/ 


BV  4501  . S7 7 

Spencer,  Malcolm. 

Work,  play,  and  the  Gospel 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/workplaygospelOOspen 


WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 
MALCOLM  SPENCER,  m.a. 


WORK, 

THE 


PLAY, 
GOSPEL 


tY 

MALCOLM  SPENCER,  M.A. 

▲UVHOR  OF  “  THE  SOCIAL  FUNCTION  OF  THE  CHURCH,” 

“  IMPASSE  OR  •'SFORTUNITY  ?  ”  SIC. 


NEW 


YORK 


GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


C\J 


WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL,  V 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  The  Educational  Approach  .  .  *  .  .  i 

I.  The  Need  for  a  New  Evangelism  •  •  .  •  i 

II.  The  Alternatives  3 

III.  Educational  Ideals  ......  6 

IV.  The  Present  Opportunity  .  ,  ,  .  .12 

II.  Those  who  Pass  the  Gospel  by  ,  ...  16 

I.  The  Craze  for  Pleasure  .  .  .  .  .  .19 

II.  The  Revolt  against  Conventionality  ...  30 

III.  The  Disavowal  of  the  Church’s  Leadership  .  .  34 

III.  Yesterday,  To-day,  and  For  Ever  ....  39 

I.  The  Fact  of  Christ  .  .  .  .  .  .  •  39 

II.  The  Fact  of  Deliverance  .....  43 

III.  The  Fact  of  Communion  with  God  .  .  .  51 

IV.  The  Fact  of  the  Church .  .  .  .  .  .  55 

IV,  The  Christian  Conception  of  Work  ...  61 

I.  The  Standards  of  Good  Work  .  .  .  .63 

II.  The  Personal  Relations  Work  brings  ...  63 

III.  The  Crux  of  the  Business  .....  74 

V.  The  Christian  Conception  of  Leisure  ...  80 

I.  The  Obvious  Uses  of  Leisure  .  .  .  ,  ,81 

II.  The  Higher  Uses  of  Leisure  •  •  •  *  •  84 

III.  Comradeship  in  Leisure  •  •  •  •  •  90 

IV.  Leisure  and  the  Church  .....  94 

V.  The  Spiritual  Potentialities  of  Drama  .  .  ,98 

v 


VI 


CONTENTS 


OUAPUR 

VI.  Beauty  and  the  Life  of  the  Spirit  # 

I.  The  Eternal  Significance  of  Beauty  .  . 

II.  The  Present  Neglect  of  Beauty  .  . 

VII.  Religious  Decision  and  Religious  Growth 
I.  The  Rudiments  of  the  Religious  Spirit  . 
IL  The  Growth  of  the  Religious  Spirit  « 

III.  The  Fostering  of  Growth  .  •  • 

IV.  Religious  Decision  •  •  •  • 


WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 


WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE 

GOSPEL 


CHAPTER  I 

THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH 

I.  The  Need  for  a  New  Evangelism 

Those  whose  religious  experiences  are  deep  are 
prone  to  love  old  ways  of  presenting  them  to  others, 
and  sometimes  these  grow  shallow  as  the  currents 
of  the  world’s  experience  change  and  desert  them. 
New  ways  are  then  needed,  and  provocation  to 
seek  them.  So,  to-day,  new  ways  of  approach  to 
the  problem  of  preaching  the  gospel  are  called  for — 
and  happily  are  being  found. 

That  this  is  so  means  neither  any  slight  to  the 
Gospel  nor  any  compliment  to  the  modern  mind. 
The  Gospel,  in  all  essentials,  is  unchanging ;  for  it 
rests  upon  immutable  facts  concerning  Jesus  Christ 
His  life  and  teaching,  His  death  and  resurrection  ; 
and  there  lies  its  power  of  appeal.  Age  cannot 
wither  its  eternal  message  to  the  human  spirit ; 
though  custom  may  a  little  stale  the  forms  and 
metaphors  in  which  it  is  set  forth.  When,  then,  we 
speak  of  our  age  needing  a  new  evangelism  it  is 

I  B 


2  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

not  the  Evangel  but  the  “  ism  ”  which,  we  think, 
needs  to  be  renewed — the  method  of  approach  to 
the  hearer’s  mind.  A  number  of  plain  facts  well 
known  to  those  who  are  studying  the  way  in  which 
attention  may  be  held,  conviction  formed,  and 
character  evolved,  convince  us  that  this  is  so. 

The  primary  need  for  some  such  new  approach 
arises  from  the  fact  that  a  wrong  conception  of 
Christianity  now  fills  the  popular  mind ;  and, 
therefore,  whilst  this  is  so,  accustomed  methods 
of  presenting  the  Gospel  must  necessarily  tend  to 
re-awaken  the  wrong  as  well  as  the  right  features  in 
the  popular  view.  In  a  word,  the  Christianity  of 
the  Churches  is  associated  in  the  mind  of  the 
ordinary  person  with  a  way  of  life  which  he  frankly 
does  not  believe  to  embody  all  the  best  things  which 
life  has  to  offer,  whilst  the  evangelist  often  appears 
to  him  in  the  r61e  of  one  who  can  only  make  the 
choice  of  it  seem  worth  while,  by  offering  him  com¬ 
pensating  interests  in  this  world,  and  corresponding 
expectations  in  the  world  to  come,  of  a  kind  he  does 
not  really  understand  or  value. 

Now  this  is  all  very  well  for  those  who  have 
come  up  against  some  outstanding  personal  problem 
of  sin  from  which  “  religion  ”  has  offered  them 
welcome  deliverance  :  they  then  feel  themselves  so 
utterly  glad  to  be  rid  of  the  past  that  they  are 
prepared  to  sacrifice  some  of  the  good  things  which 
they  valued  formerly — as  the  just  price  of  tneir 
new  freedom.  But  for  those  who  are  not  so 
harassed  by  a  particular  moral  need,  religious 
conversion  is  apt  to  be  secured,  if  at  all,  at  the  cost 
of  a  dangerous  suppression  of  their  real  self,  and 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  3 

the  result  is  evidenced  in  some  cases  by  a  wildly 
fanatical  and  quite  unreasoning  zeal,  but  more 
frequently  by  an  only  half-hearted  attachment  to 
the  new  way  of  life. 

Put  very  briefly,  the  difficulty  is  that  Christianity 
is  associated  popularly  with  the  acceptance  of  an 
unduly  ascetic  ideal  of  life,  an  unreasonable  narrow¬ 
ing  of  life’s  legitimate  interests,  an  unthoughtful 
use  of  the  Bible  and  other  means  of  grace,  and  an 
unsportsmanlike  anxiety  about  one’s  own  soul. 
Under  these  circumstances  evangelism  has  to  take 
its  choice  between  two  ways.  It  may  either  try 
to  meet  the  situation  by  ignoring  the  existence  of 
any  real  problem,  proceeding  then  to  reiterate  its 
own  beliefs,  and  taking  care  to  create  the  most 
favourable  occasions  possible  for  their  acceptance 
— as  now  in  not  a  few  well-advertised  revivalist 
missions  ;  or  it  may  try  the  slower  method  of  the 
educational  approach. 

II.  The  Alternatives 

The  tendency  of  those  who  take  the  former 
course  is  to  disparage  the  everyday  life  of  the 
world,  to  regard  enthusiasm  for  recreation,  or  art, 
or  business,  or  thought,  or  social  reform,  as 
dangerous  rivals  to  the  claims  of  Christ,  to  hold  to 
reactionary  views  of  the  Bible,  to  repeat  the  doctrinal 
shibboleths  of  the  nineteenth  century,  to  despair 
of  seeing  Christian  influences  penetrate  the  social 
life  of  the  world,  and  to  be  content  with  this  so 
long  as  individual  “  souls  ”  are  saved.  However 
much  good  may  be  achieved  along  these  lines  it  is 


4  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

impossible  to  expect  that  such  evangelism  can  ever 
succeed  in  meeting  more  than  the  tiniest  fraction 
of  the  needs  of  this  generation.  Violence  is  done 
to  the  instinctive  and  quite  proper  reserve  of  a 
personality  when  the  citadel  of  the  soul  is  captured 
by  an  assault  on  the  emotions  that  does  not  at 
the  same  time  satisfy  the  whole  mind.  Moreover, 
men  and  women  are  then  rushed  into  positions 
which  they  cannot  possibly  continue  to  hold,  since 
parts  of  their  personalities  remain  unconvinced 
and  unsatisfied. 

We  cannot  too  clearly  lay  hold  of  the  fact  that 
“  conversion  ”  is  only  possible  for  the  man  who  has 
in  his  mind  two  fairly  well  articulated  systems  of 
life  which  are  mutually  exclusive,  one  of  which  he  is 
following  and  knows  he  should  renounce,  and  the 
other  of  which  he  is  neglecting  and  knows  he  should 
espouse,  and  these  contrasted  schemes  of  life  are  not 
present  in  most  minds  nowadays.  Indeed,  they  are 
very  far  from  being  present,  and  their  absence 
makes  the  appeal  to  decide  between  them  fatuous. 
Till  we  have  established  in  the  hearer’s  mind,  as 
truth,  the  idea  that  Christianity  stands  for  a  fully 
satisfying  life,  we  cannot  wish  him  to  be  converted. 
The  Christian  scheme  of  thought  and  way  of  life 
need  then  to  be  presented  as  the  practical  way  to 
the  realisation  of  an  all-inclusive  ideal  of  life,  and 
not  merely  as  demanded  on  the  authority  of  the 
Bible,  or  of  the  Church,  or  as  meeting  any  need  of 
salvation  which  has  to  be  aroused  by  suggestion 
before  it  is  felt  in  any  real  sense. 

There  are,  doubtless,  many  whose  training  has 
sufficiently  persuaded  them  that  to  be  a  Christian 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  5 

is  the  only  really  right  and  completely  satisfying 
thing  to  be  done,  and  their  need  is  for  something  to 
rush  them  past  and  over  their  unworthy  hesitations 
and  delays.  But  this  is  not  the  typical  case.  The 
typical  case  is  one  in  which  the  idea  of  Christ  and 
Christianity  is  neither  intellectually  coherent  nor 
morally  convincing.  In  the  popular  mind  religion 
stands  for  the  disavowal  of  things  felt  to  be  right 
and  good,  and  the  acceptance  of  a  discipline  felt 
to  be  both  irksome  and  arbitrary.  The  practical 
obligations  of  Christian  discipleship  are  vague  and 
shadowy,  and  not  truly  representative  of  Christ. 
Hence  the  need  for  a  clearer  background  of  what 
Christian  living  means  before  the  appeal  for  Chris¬ 
tian  decision  can  be  pressed. 

We  are  therefore  bound  to  recognise  the 
difficulties  of  the  position,  and  to  face  them  out  ; 
and  this  is  the  educational  way  of  approach  to 
evangelism.  Its  primary  difference  from  the  alter¬ 
native  method  we  have  so  briefly  described  is  this  : 
that  it  believes  that  the  Gospel  is  indeed  the  Crown 
and  fulfilment  of  the  natural  life  and  not  its  jealous 
rival.  Through  all  the  social  life  of  man  it  sees  the 
movement  of  the  Spirit  of  God  toward  high  and 
worthy  forms  of  life.  In  the  passion  for  gratifica¬ 
tion  in  play,  or  in  the  ambition  for  success  in 
business,  or  in  devotion  to  the  claims  of  historic 
truth,  or  the  call  of  some  great  cause  in  politics, 
it  sees  the  human  spirit  struggling  to  realise  its 
divine  possibilities  and  needing  only  guidance  and  a 
true  vision  of  life  to  bring  it  through  to  its  spiritual 
goal.  It  does  not  seek  to  save  the  soul  by  diverting 
its  attention  from  these  human  interests  and  aims, 


6  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

but  by  discovering  their  deeper  meanings  and  higher 
possibilities,  and  by  pointing  out  things  in  them  all 
on  which  the  stamp  of  God’s  approval  can  be  set. 
Its  aim  is  a  personality  in  which  all  the  native 
energies  which  man  possesses  for  enjoyment  and 
achievement  wax  strong,  and  support  and  harmonise 
with  one  another,  because  all  are  made  contributory 
to  the  wholly  satisfying  and  all-inclusive  purpose 
revealed  for  humanity  in  Jesus  Christ.  The  tempta¬ 
tion  of  the  educational  method  is  to  sow  to  the 
spirit  more  than  it  knows  how  to  reap  ;  its  strength 
lies  in  its  fundamental  faith  that  man,  in  all  the 
variety  of  his  social  impulses,  is  indeed  made  in  the 
image  of  God.  With  this  belief  we  shall,  throughout 
this  book,  try  to  connect  the  ideas  for  which 
education  and  evangelism  respectively  stand. 

III.  Educational  Ideal9 

In  turning,  as  we  do  turn  in  this  book,  to  the 
science  of  education  for  light  on  the  methods  of 
evangelism,  we  do  so,  of  course,  with  reservations. 
We  are  not  giving  ourselves  over,  bound  hand  and 
foot,  to  an  empirical  science.  The  work  done  by  the 
teaching  profession  and  by  those  who  have  studied 
the  theory  of  teaching,  sheds  abundant  light  upon 
the  processes  by  which  minds  grow  and  character 
is  formed.  It  shows  quite  clearly  the  hollowness 
and  instability  of  conversions  reached  by  certain 
processes  and  of  choices  made  under  certain  con¬ 
ditions.  It  knows  a  good  deal  of  the  genesis  of  the 
human  mind  and  the  laws  of  its  elementary  work¬ 
ings,  and  it  provides  implements  of  criticism  by 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  7 

which  to  test  the  wisdom  of  this  method  and  of 
that.  The  value  of  what  the  educationists  are 
teaching  about  method  can  hardly  be  overrated  by 
those  who  understand  the  need  to  respect  the  unity 
of  human  personality.  At  the  same  time  there  are 
heights  of  personality  which  the  educationist  as 
such  has  not  scaled  and  depths  which  he  has  not 
plumbed.  Great  is  the  mystery  of  the  human  soul, 
and  among  “  the  masters  of  those  that  know  55  we 
must  turn  sometimes  for  our  clues  to  the  evidence 
of  the  saints  who  had  no  educational  theories  to 
help  or  to  check  them,  and  to  the  experience  of 
evangelists  and  revivalists  of  all  degrees  of  educa¬ 
tional  competence.  For  as  those  concerned  in  the 
Gospel,  we  want  to  help  to  fashion  personalities 
that  not  only  love  goodness,  truth,  and  beauty,  but 
that  attain  through  these  things  to  a  personal 
communion  with  a  personal  God.  We  want  to  see 
men  and  women  converted  to  the  God  and  Father 
of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 

All  this  does  not,  however,  take  away  one  whit 
from  the  value  of  the  discoveries  made  by  those  who 
have  worked  in  the  field  of  education,  concerning 
the  way  in  which  the  spiritual  unfolding  of  human 
nature  may  best  proceed.  And  we  may  feel  fully 
justified  in  looking  for  guidance  from  this  quarter, 
since  we  know  that  modem  educationists,  or  at 
least  an  important  section  of  them,  accept  a  view 
of  the  ultimate  aim  and  purpose  of  education  which 
makes  it  essentially  spiritual,  and  even  evangelical. 
For  it  is  the  fact  that,  for  many  educators,  the  whole 
purpose  of  education  is  to  awaken  the  personality 
of  the  pupil  to  the  truth  and  beauty  and  goodness 


8  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

which  God  has  impressed  upon  the  world.  Whether 
they  are  teaching  history  or  geography  or  mathe¬ 
matics,  they  are  trying  to  pass  on  their  own  sense 
of  the  wonder  of  life,  its  deep  worth-whileness,  the 
stores  of  joy  to  be  found  in  entering  into  all  its 
manifold  revelations  of  God’s  goodwill  to  man,  its 
moving  appeals  to  his  better  nature,  and  its  calls 
for  his  response  to  the  purposes  of  creation. 

The  best  teachers  of  to-day  are  not  trying  to 
turn  little  boys  and  girls  into  effective  little  ready- 
reckoners,  each  made  on  the  same  pattern,  to  say 
“  please  ”  and  “  thank  you  ”  and  be  industrious  in 
making  money  and  getting  on.  They  are  treating 
them  as  God’s  children,  born  into  God’s  world  to 
enjoy  what  is  good  and  right  in  it,  and  to  fill  their 
beings  so  full  of  its  goodness  and  rightness  that  they 
become  themselves  persons  in  the  divine  likeness, 
with  the  power  of  the  divine  spirit  working  in  them 
and  making  them  new  sources  of  creative  goodness 
according  to  their  several  abilities.  The  educator 
is  thus  seeking  not  only  and  not  even  primarily  to 
pass  on  what  he  knows  of  life  to  those  whom  he 
teaches  ;  he  is  seeking  primarily  to  help  them,  by 
looking  at  the  world  through  his  and  their  own 
eyes,  to  discover  themselves  and  God.  Some  will 
say  quite  definitely  that  the  only  adequate  aim  of 
any  education  is  a  vision  of  God’s  purpose  for  the 
world  which  will  give  unity  and  purpose  to  each 
individual  life.  Thus  a  recent  great  book  on 
education,*  which  Prof.  Michael  Sadler  hails  as  a 
permanent  classic,  makes  the  end  of  all  education 
the  establishment  in  the  mind  of  the  pupil  of  a 
*  **  Education  and  World  Citizenship,”  by  J.  Maxwell  Garnett. 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  9 

single  all-embracing  interest,  the  interest  of  estab¬ 
lishing  the  Kingdom  of  God  upon  earth.  In  that 
definition  the  educationist  joins  hands  with  the 
evangelist  and  implicitly  commits  himself  to  the 
need  for  the  Gospel  as  the  crown  of  his  work.  At 
the  same  time,  he  binds  upon  the  evangelist  the 
duty  of  showing  how  the  principles  of  the  Gospel 
can  be  made  operative  over  the  whole  of  life.  He 
demands  that  the  Christian’s  experience  of  Christ 
should  be  shown  to  be  no  mere  fragment  or  section 
of  his  total  experience,  but  that  the  whole  of  his 
life,  with  all  its  business  and  social  interests,  should 
be  an  experience  of  living  for  and  with  Christ. 

Those  educationists  who  take  this  view  have 
seized  upon  an  essentially  Christian  conception  of 
personality  and  built  upon  it.  In  some  ways  such 
educationists  are  more  evangelical  than  some 
evangelists — they  have  a  bigger  gospel ;  they 
promise  a  life  more  full  of  God  in  all  its  earthly 
relationships,  without  waiting  for  death  to  release  its 
larger  spiritual  possibilities.  They  view  the  child  (and 
later  the  adult)  as  essentially  a  spiritual  being,  with 
a  wonderful  power  of  free  response  to  ideal  impulses 
and  an  instinct  for  expressing  these  in  action  in  the 
material  world.  All  the  child’s  faculties  are  capable 
of  being  brought  into  harmony  with  one  another 
in  the  service  of  these  ideals,  if  they  are  not  foolishly 
repressed  or  perverted.  The  educator  may  not 
be  prepared  to  dogmatise  about  the  lengths  to  which 
the  development  of  the  individual  may  go.  That 
is  the  evangelist’s  business.  But  he  is  prepared 
to  assure  us  that  there  is  an  almost  universal 
appetite  among  children  for  the  finer  and  higher 


10  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

things  in  life,  that  all  the  child’s  instincts  and 
powers  can  be  educated  into  harmony  and  made  to 
serve  a  spiritual  ideal,  and  that  the  unfolding  in 
him  of  a  fine  moral  and  spiritual  life  is  a  strictly 
natural  development.  It  is  a  tremendous  fact  to 
work  upon  and  one  from  which  the  skilful  educator 
gets  full  value. 

See,  for  instance,  what  the  educationist  makes  of 
the  child’s  instinct  for  play.  He  recognises  in  it 
an  activity  into  which  the  child  has  a  natural 
aptitude  for  pouring  all  his  energy  and  so  building 
himself  up.  Get  him  at  play,  and  you  get  him  with 
all  his  senses  alert  and  his  being  malleable.  Then 
guide  his  play,  and  you  can  mould  him  as  by  no 
other  means.  You  can  teach  him  to  play  himself 
right  through  the  gateways  into  the  Kingdom  of 
God.  By  play  he  may  be  taught  skill  and  sympathy, 
unselfishness  and  co-operation.  Even  the  spirit  of 
worship  may  be  fostered  through  play  ;  and  all 
because  the  natural  is  a  fit  medium  for  the  spiritual. 
Here,  indeed,  is  one  of  the  points  where  the  evange¬ 
list  has  most  to  learn  from  the  educator.  “  Give 
me  the  child  at  play,”  says  the  educator,  “  I  ask 
no  better  opportunity  for  educational  influence.,, 
“  Play,”  says  many  an  evangelist  of  to-day,  “  is 
my  great  enemy  ;  the  dances  and  the  tennis-courts 
have  driven  me  from  my  field,  and  now  I  am 
threatened  with  their  rivalry  even  on  Sunday : 
where  will  religion  be  found  in  the  next  decade  ?  ” 
We  need  to  learn  from  the  educator  how  to  utilise 
for  spiritual  purposes  the  profusion  of  the  modern 
passion  for  play.  May  not  these  pleasure-seekers 
in  some  instances  also  be  drawn  through  play  at 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  n 


least  to  the  portals  of  the  Kingdom  of  God,  just  as 
is  now  the  case  with  their  younger  brothers  and 
sisters  at  school  ?  The  issue  may  seem  a  trivial  one, 
but  it  is  not.  It  is  fundamental. 

Behind  this  use  of  play  by  the  modern  educa¬ 
tionist  lies  a  truly  evangelical  philosophy  of  life 
and  personality.  It  is  found  not  only  in  the 
educationist’s  “  good  newrs 55  that  the  abundant 
energies  of  youth  can  be  directed  naturally  into  the 
furtherance  of  what  is  good,  true,  and  desirable  ; 
it  is  found  also  in  the  recognition  that  if  these 
energies  are  to  be  so  devoted  with  vigour  and 
enthusiasm,  the  spirit  must  be  led  towards  its  goal 
by  free  and  unhurried  steps.  You  cannot  drive 
or  thwack  personality  into  the  acceptance  of  ideals  ; 
you  can  only  lead  it  thither  at  its  own  pace.  You 
can  give  the  opportunity  for  the  things  which  are 
worthy  of  admiration  to  exert  their  own  attraction. 
You  cannot  impose  your  own  values  on  the  minds  of 
others.  When  education  was  regarded  as  a  matter 
of  transmitting  to  children  the  settled  habits  and 
ideas  of  their  elders,  it  did  seem  as  though  the 
process  could  be  consummated  with  whips  and 
sharp  injunctions  ;  authority  always  standing  in  the 
background  ready  to  enforce  its  rules  and  standards 
with  reiterations  or  punishments.  But  we  know 
now  that  what  you  procure  in  that  way  is  either  a 
sullen  spirit  of  revolt  smouldering  beneath  an  inert 
obedience,  or  at  the  best  a  sterile  acceptance  of  the 
code  imposed,  lacking  the  energy  and  enthusiasm 
of  an  independent  conviction.  You  cannot  produce 
conviction  by  heavy  insistence :  you  can  only 
produce  conviction  by  convincing,  and  that  is  a 


iz  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

process  which  consists  in  producing  evidence  that 
what  is  alleged  to  be  true  is  true  when  put  to  the 
test.  All  this  will  be  seen  to  be  relevant  to  the 
problem  of  evangelism  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  way  in  which  the  herald  of  the  gospel  hopes  to 
win  his  hold  upon  the  modern,  not  too  favourably 
biased,  mind. 


IV.  The  Present  Opportunity 

The  evangelism  for  which  we  argue  is  therefore 
closely  allied  with  the  more  spiritual  schools  of 
educational  principle  which  now  most  certainly  hold 
the  field.  And  thus  it  follows  that  the  preacher 
can  build  his  methods  to-day  upon  the  experience 
of  the  teacher,  and  in  practice  each  can  play  into 
the  hands  of  the  other.  This  will  be  a  tremendous 
gain  to  both  education  and  religion  if  lull  advantage 
be  taken  of  it.  For  a  long  time,  teacher  and  preacher 
have  been  at  cross  purposes,  and  education  has  not 
been  seen  by  either  as  a  partnership  in  a  single 
spiritual  process.  But  if  the  inherence  of  spiritual 
suggestions  and  ideals  in  all  material  facts  and  the 
evidence  of  spiritual  evolution  in  all  human  history 
could  now  be  recognised  by  teacher  and  preacher 
alike,  the  teacher  could  build  up  his  scholars  in  a 
spiritual  conception  of  the  world  which  the  preacher 
could  afterwards  confirm  with  his  crowning  message 
of  the  supreme  personal  relation  declared  possible 
in  the  Gospel  between  individuals  and  God. 

Preacher  and  teacher  being  thus  seen  to  have  a 
common  purpose,  the  aim  of  education  might  grow 
clearer  to  both,  and  the  methods  of  evangelism  gain 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  13 

particularly  in  precision  by  the  more  exact  results 
of  educational  study.  Moreover,  the  gain  to 
evangelism  would  not  merely  be  in  the  realm  of 
method.  Educational  thinking  has,  as  we  have 
seen,  worked  out  a  great  conception  of  the  royal 
freedom  and  divine  capacity  of  each  individual 
mind,  wonderfully  interpreting  and  emphasising 
the  Christian  conception  of  the  value  of  the 
soul.  Education  has  thus  taken  up  a  conception 
which  it  gained  originally  from  Christianity  and 
has  articulated  it  so  clearly  that  the  content  of 
the  Gospel  is  permanently  enriched.  No  one 
who  desires  to  preach  the  Gospel  to  modern  minds 
can  afford  to  be  negligent  of  the  truth  so  clearly 
unfolded. 

Yet  whilst  we  emphasise  the  spiritual  unity  of 
life,  the  spiritual  tendencies  of  human  nature,  the 
urge  of  the  Spirit  of  God  toward  the  achievement 
of  its  ideals  of  goodness  and  loveliness  by  many 
means,  and  on  every  hand,  we  do  not  forget  that 
the  Power  and  Beauty  of  the  Spirit  of  God  are  not 
manifested  equally  in  every  sphere  of  life.  They 
are  manifested  supremely  in  Jesus  Christ  alone,  and 
less  perfectly,  though  still  magnificently,  in  the  lives 
which  have  most  utterly  yielded  to  the  inflow  of 
His  divine  life  into  themselves.  So  the  educa¬ 
tional  process  falls  short  of  its  consummation 
unless  it  is  completed  by  the  evangelist  who  has 
nothing  to  tell  the  world  save  the  story  of  Jesus 
and  His  disciples. 

Moreover,  though  the  spiritual  unfolding  of 
personality  may  be  indeed  a  strictly  natural  process, 
toward  which  the  education  of  every  human 


i4  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

faculty  may  contribute,  yet  there  is  a  downward 
pull  toward  death  and  stagnation  to  be  reckoned 
with,  and  an  evil  will  in  man  which  resists  the 
upward  climb.  There  is  a  stiff  fight  for  goodness  to 
be  fought  out  in  every  life,  and  no  one  has  yet  put 
forward  any  claimant  for  the  power  to  overcome 
the  lure  of  evil  other  than  Jesus  Christ.  The 
power  to  save  men  from  the  strong  things  which 
tend  toward  corruption  and  to  bind  them  to  the 
exacting  courses  which  make  for  life  is  His  and  His 
alone.  He  oniy  can  lift  the  degenerate  from  their 
lethargy  and  worldly-mindedness,  and  do  away 
with  our  dull  conventionality  of  soul.  The  Gospel 
is  not  written  in  the  book  of  Nature,  nor  in  the  book 
of  History,  except  as  interpreted  by  Him.  The 
vision  of  Jesus  and  the  story  of  what  He  has  meant 
to  men  are  the  supreme  facts  to  which  men  need 
to  respondfor  their  salvation,  and  the  right  presenta¬ 
tion  of  them,  which  is  the  work  of  the  evangelist,  is 
therefore  the  supreme  task  of  those  who  know  the 
secret  of  life  in  Christ. 

From  this  the  presentation  of  the  Gospel  might 
seem  to  be  a  matter  requiring  no  particular  educa¬ 
tional  skill — as  though  Jesus  were  so  supreme  a 
figure  that  no  art  of  presentation  could  either  add 
to  or  diminish  the  direct  power  of  His  appeal.  And 
yet  we  know  that  this  is  not  so.  For  since  we 
cannot  easily,  or  without  art,  divest  our  statements 
of  any  facts  from  our  habitual  interpretation  of 
them,  so  in  preaching  Christ  we  shall  tend  to 
emphasise  those  aspects  of  His  work  and  personality 
which  have  most  appealed  to  us,  and  perhaps  to 
hide  or  obscure  what  would  more  readily  appeal  to 


THE  EDUCATIONAL  APPROACH  15 

others.  Before,  therefore,  we  attempt  to  state  the 
essential  message  of  the  Gospel,  we  turn  to  consider 
the  modern  attitude  to  religion,  and  especially  the 
attitude  of  those  who  are  young, — if  so  be  that  we 
may  find  there  our  clue  to  the  best  method  of  its 
presentation. 


Footnote  to  Chapter  I 

For  the  view  of  education  taken  in  this  chapter  and  applied  to 
the  problems  of  religious  education,  especially  in  my  closing  chapter, 
I  am  very  largely  indebted  to  T.  Percy  Nunn,  Professor  of  Educa¬ 
tion  in  the  University  of  London.  I  should  like  to  refer  particularly 
to  his  book  in  the  Modern  Educator’s  Library  (Edward  Arnold,  6j.) 
entitled,  Education  ;  its  Data  and  First  Principles . 


CHAPTER  II 

THOSE  WHO  PASS  THE  GOSPEL  BY 

How  variously  different  speakers  and  writers 
estimate  the  religious  condition  of  our  time  !  To 
some  it  is  an  age  when  morals  are  declining  and  the 
faith  is  being  put  in  pawn  by  its  own  adherents  in 
their  eagerness  to  do  homage  to  the  modern  mind. 
By  others  it  is  said  that  never  was  there  a  time 
when  Christianity  was  so  widely  and  truly  under¬ 
stood,  so  seriously  taken  as  it  is  by  those  who  still 
profess  and  call  themselves  Christian.  But  in  no 
quarter  is  there  found  any  question  of  the  general 
public  revolt  from  the  practice  of  public  worship, 
and  the  practical  severance  of  the  ties  which  held 
many  to  the  Church.  It  is  quite  symptomatic  that 
our  streets  are  thronged  with  pleasure-seekers  at 
the  time  conventionally  appointed  for  the  united 
seeking  of  God  in  prayer. 

The  single  fact  of  widest  bearing  that  underlies 
these  diverse  estimates  is  that  this  is  an  age  of 
enfranchisement  from  the  conventions  of  the  past. 
If  there  are  fewer  professing  Christians  than  there 
were,  it  is  in  the  main  because  men  are  ceasing  to 
make  profession  of  religion  merely  conventionally. 
Whether  in  moral  or  spiritual  matters,  the  sort  of 
authority  which  held  the  majority,  weakly  com¬ 
pliant  but  not  enthusiastically  convinced,  has  lost 

16 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


*7 

its  ascendancy.  The  world  is  growing  up  and 
asking  questions  ;  it  is  refusing  to  be  satisfied  with 
the  answers  which  satisfied  it  of  old.  Those  who 
persevere  with  their  questions  come  through  to  a 
faith  which  means  more  to  them,  in  some  ways, 
than  the  faith  which  was  more  traditionally  and 
less  questioningly  acquired.  But  we  cannot  claim 
that  the  change  is  all  clear  gain.  The  faith  that 
has  been  thus  fought  for  is  sometimes  scarred  and 
maimed.  Christians  who  ask  questions  of  their 
faith  sometimes  ask  more  than  their  experience  can 
answer,  and  bear  about  them  the  marks  of  their 
dissatisfaction  with  their  own  solutions.  There  is 
less  of  that  easy  optimism  and  cocksureness  which 
enabled  the  religious  to  carry  the  day  with  the 
unthinking,  and  which  was  the  basis  (by  suggestion) 
of  so  much  of  the  good  and  evil  of  the  past.  Leaving 
aside,  however,  the  inner  ring  of  more  or  less  con¬ 
vinced  believers  in  Christianity,  to  whom  the  change 
has  brought  much  benefit,  we  have  to  consider  the 
needs  of  the  crowd  which  has  for  the  moment 
slipped  away  from  the  direct  influence  of  expressed 
religion.  It  is  with  this  pressing  problem  that 
evangelism  has  particularly  to  deal. 

Before,  howrever,  we  enter  upon  our  detailed 
analysis  of  the  problem  let  us  be  sure  that  the 
present  phenomena  cannot  mean  any  sudden 
fundamental  collapse  in  the  spiritual  susceptibility 
of  those  with  whom  we  have  to  do.  Fundamentally 
they  are  much  the  same  as  their  forefathers.  They 
have  the  same  emotions,  the  same  physical  and 
psychic  needs,  the  same  susceptibility  to  experience, 
the  same  affinities  with  good  and  evil.  The 

c 


1 8  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

educational  sciences  forbid  us  to  believe  in  any  such 
sudden  slump  in  human  nature  as  the  scaremongers 
in  the  religious  world  would  have  us  affirm.  Funda¬ 
mentally  these  men  and  women  who  on  Sunday 
shut  themselves  in  their  suburban  gardens,  are  the 
same  as  their  fathers  who  never  failed  to  go  to 
Church.  These  boys  and  girls  who  swarm  along 
the  city  streets  are  not  less  religiously  inclined  than 
their  predecessors.  Their  religious  development  is 
arrested,  and  they  will  suffer  for  it  ;  but  there  is 
nothing  portentous  or  overwhelming  in  the  present 
phase  of  things.  By  those  who  have  faith  and 
patience,  there  is  a  solution  to  be  found,  and  the 
clues  to  its  discovery  are  known  to  those  who  are 
experienced  in  observing  the  ways  of  the  human 
mind. 

But  whether  this  be  admitted  or  no,  it  is  plainly 
futile  to  rail  at  the  iniquity  of  a  generation  and 
bemoan  its  evil  tendencies.  It  is  as  absurd  to 
indict  a  whole  generation  as  it  is  to  indict  a  whole 
nation.  What  is  found  common  to  them  all  is, 
for  each  single  one  of  them,  virtually  inevitable, 
in  view  of  the  strong  hold  of  public  opinion  over 
unawakened  minds  ;  each  average  individual  is  the 
child  of  an  environment  whose  moulding  tendencies 
all  but  overwhelm  the  puny  forces  which  are  at  his 
call.  When  the  religious  response  of  multitudes  is 
as  deficient  as  it  is  to-day,  it  must  be  due  to  some 
radical  blemish  in  the  religious  influences  of  the 
times.  We  can  only  meet  the  situation  by  ceasing 
to  rail  at  it  and  learning  to  diagnose  it.  Diagnosis 
will  reveal  both  the  nature  of  the  trouble  and  the 
point  at  which  it  must  be  attacked  ;  it  may  also 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


19 


afford  at  least  some  clue  to  the  proper  remedy. 
We  are  not  for  a  moment  inclined  to  discharge  any 
class  of  individuals  from  their  own  particular  share 
of  responsibility  for  the  use  they  are  making  of 
the  light  and  leading  God  has  given  them  ;  but  if 
we  would  lay  that  responsibility  as  heavily  upon 
them  as  it  should  be  laid,  we  are  bound  to  recognise, 
first  of  all,  how  tightly  they  are  gripped  by  the 
thought  forces  in  their  social  environment.  We 
shall  have  to  discriminate  presently  between  what 
is  good  and  what  is  evil  in  these  modern  fashions 
of  thought. 

What,  then,  are  the  characteristics  of  the 
religious  indifference  of  the  hour  ?  What,  especially, 
is  the  religious  outlook  of  those  who  are  young 
enough  to  be  the  representatives  of  the  post-war 
period  ?  What  in  the  mental  make-up  of  the  young 
people  of  the  present  day  are  the  fundamental 
factors  which  we  must  take  for  granted  as  the 
undeniable  data  for  our  problem — to  be  met, 
not  with  reproach  but  with  understanding  and 
sympathy  ?  Analysis  carried  far  enough  will  reveal 
to  us  in  every  case  that  they  are  the  intelligible 
perversions  of  natural  tendencies  which  might  be 
diverted  or  converted  to  good  ends  if  only  they  were 
understood.  But  first,  what  are  they  l  Three  in 
particular  claim  attention. 

I.  The  Craze  for  Pleasure 

Let  us  begin  with  the  most  obvious  and  im¬ 
mediately  disconcerting  factor  of  all,  the  modern 
passion  for  pleasure — a  passion  which  modern 


zo  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

business  enterprise  so  successfully  exploits.  Not 
of  this  generation  will  any  prophet  say,  “  I  have 
piped  unto  you,  and  ye  have  not  danced.”  The 
world  is  drinking  in  amusement  like  a  thirsty  horse 
with  its  head  in  the  river.  But  who  can  wonder, 
whilst  we  are  not  yet  ten  years  beyond  the  gloomy 
terrors  of  universal  war  which  robbed  the  young 
manhood  of  the  nation  of  its  most  irresponsible 
years  ?  Who  can  wonder  when  the  girlhood  of  the 
nation  has  just  passed  through  a  total  subversion 
of  its  old  standards  of  living  ;  when  the  old-time 
notion  of  a  stay-at-home  life  as  the  girl’s  inevitable 
portion  has  been  swept  completely  awTay;  when 
girls  have  been  everywhere  and  done  everything, 
and  raised  money  enough  to  live  in  unaccustomed 
luxury ;  who  can  wonder  when  the  whole  world  of 
young  people  has  awakened  up  with  a  start  to  the  idea 
that  it  has  been  kept  in  pupilage  too  late  and  too  long? 

Youth  has  been  discovering  the  thrill  of  physical 
health  and  vigour,  the  joy  of  bodily  grace  and 
movement  :  how  natural,  then,  its  repudiation  of 
the  stuffy  ways  of  a  generation  which  so  wrapped 
its  body  up  that  it  was  always  liable  physically  to 
cold  and  anaemia,  and  morally  to  prudery  and 
acidity  of  mind !  How  rightly,  too,  is  it  in  revolt 
against  a  civilisation  which  has  let  millions  live  in 
the  dark  and  murk  and  dirt  of  city  slums,  which 
has  maimed  and  stunted  millions  more  in  occupa¬ 
tions  beyond  the  normal  endurance  of  the  human 
frame,  and  which  has  made  aesthetic  and  intellectual 
satisfaction  the  prerogative  of  the  few !  How 
natural  if,  instead,  it  is  now  claiming  its  fill  of  light 
and  air  and  fun  and  fitness ! 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


21 


Dr.  Rufus  Jones  has  said  recently  that  we  are 
confronted  by  a  generation  of  boys  and  girls  who 
seem  to  be  unconcerned  whether  God  exists  or  not. 
They  are  not  lawless  ;  they  merely  appear  to  have 
no  interest  in  religion.  They  have  eliminated  that 
dimension  of  the  soul  which  opens  out  into  fellow¬ 
ship  with  a  great,  invisible  Companion.  The 
greater  number  of  young  people,  says  another  wit¬ 
ness,  so  fill  their  lives  with  pleasure  and  work,  and 
live  at  such  a  speed  that  they  have  no  time  for  quiet 
and  reflection.  It  is  not  that  they  are  essentially 
more  frivolous  than  the  young  men  and  women,  for 
example,  of  a  hundred  years  ago.  On  the  whole 
they  compare  favourably  with  the  young  ladies  and 
gentlemen  of  the  pages  of  Jane  Austen.  But  the 
Christian  life  seems  to  them  dull,  uneventful,  and 
inartistic,  and  without  appeal  to  their  abundant 
activity.  No  place  can  be  found  in  it  for  the  self- 
expression  shown,  for  example,  in  their  love  of 
games.  The  Christian  ideal  of  life  inculcates  self- 
restraint,  self-denial,  and  effacement  ;  they  feel  that 
it  would  force  them  into  an  atmosphere  which  would 
stifle  them.  Many  forms  of  heroism  make  an  appeal 
to  them,  but  not  this  form.  Partly  because  they 
are  generous-minded  the  offer  of  individual  salvation 
makes  no  appeal  to  them  ;  nor  are  they  afflicted  with 
a  sense  of  sin  which  might  make  the  offer  more 
acceptable.  They  are  not  indecisive,  nor  yet 
indifferent  ;  their  strong  devotion  to  pleasure  and 
sport  proves  this.  They  are  capable  of  great 
enthusiasm.  But  their  sense  of  values  is  wrong. 
Some  day  they  may  learn  the  paradox  that  “  He 
that  loseth  his  life  shall  find  it.”  But  at  present 


22  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

the  call  they  hear  is  a  call  to  take  hold  of  the  things 
life  offers  them,  to  enjoy  them,  and  prove  their 
worth,  and  so  they  follow  their  natural  instincts  and 
desires  to  excess.  The  tide  race  of  their  physical 
nature  is  now  running  fast  and  will  not  be  turned 
back  by  any  pious  indignation  or  highly  spiced 
variety  of  religious  emotional  appeal.  A  hunger  for 
the  sweetness  and  the  colour  of  life  has  been  created, 
first  by  years  of  starvation,  and  then  by  a  riot  of 
opportunity  for  sense  satisfaction.  It  may  well  be 
a  matter  of  sheer  biological  advisability  that  the 
hunger  should  be  satisfied.  As  the  British  Medical 
Association  has  been  saying,  a  certain  amount  of 
conviviality  is  necessary  at  all  times  for  the  mainte¬ 
nance  of  our  mental  stability,  and  what  is  true 
generally  must  be  specially  true  to-day.  Certainly 
it  is  for  the  educator  to  accept  the  fact  of  this 
hunger  and  to  offer  ways  of  satisfaction  that  are 
spiritually  educative. 

The  last  remark  implies  that  there  is  in  this 
hunger  for  pleasure  some  hunger  of  the  spirit,  which 
can  be  discriminated  from  the  lower  hunger  of  flesh 
and  sense,  and  fed  with  spiritual  bread.  And  surely 
there  is.  There  is  a  hunger  of  the  spirit  for  gaiety 
and  a  refusal  of  the  bread  and  water  of  affliction 
that  must  be  dear  to  the  heart  of  Jesus  when  He 
said,  “  Take  no  anxious  thought  for  the  morrow, 
for  the  morrow  will  take  thought  for  itself  :  sufficient 
unto  the  day  is  the  evil  thereof.”  This  generation 
has  been  taught  that  its  total  energies  must  be 
absorbed  in  eating  and  fighting,  and  producing  the 
means  to  eat  and  fight.  It  may  be  that,  mixed  up 
with  the  pleasure  hunger  of  the  day,  there  is  a 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


23 


spiritual  revolt  against  the  dark  modern  philosophy 
of  a  commercial  age  which  has  left  too  little  room  for 
the  cultivation  of  joy.  Duty  first,  pleasure  after¬ 
wards,  is  an  unimpeachable  doctrine  to  many  of 
our  moral  guides,  but  it  is  doubtful  if  it  is  not  a 
damnable  heresy  from  the  Christian  standpoint. 
It  implies  that  there  is  no  pleasure  in  duty  and  no 
duty  in  pleasure,  and  the  divorce  between  the  two 
is  a  wicked  indictment  of  the  bounty  of  God’s 
provision  for  the  world. 

There  are  many  who  say  plainly  that  as  it  works 
out,  it  means  that  they  may  break  their  backs  and 
starve  their  souls  to  produce  wealth  and  ever  more 
wealth  for  the  wealthy  »  and  to  many  of  those 
who  are  not  poor  themselves,  it  means  that  they 
must  live  in  harness  till  they  are  blind  to  all  values 
but  the  values  of  getting  on.  This  country,  without 
any  shadow  of  doubt,  has  sacrificed  its  sense  of 
light  and  shade,  of  charm  and  beauty,  of  melody 
and  gaiety,  to  the  gods  of  steel  and  iron,  and  to  the 
virtue  of  getting  on.  And  we  are  poor  in  imagina¬ 
tion,  poor  in  artistic  capacity,  poor  in  abstract 
thought  because  of  this.  We  have  cultivated  a 
dull  insensibility  to  the  appeals  of  the  ideal  world. 
The  only  time  we  have  allowed  to  many  to  dream 
and  frolic  has  been  when  they  were  already  physi¬ 
cally  and  emotionally  exhausted  with  tending 
machines.  It  is  to  be  remembered  that  we  are  not 
three  generations  away  from  the  good  folk  who  sent 
children  into  mines  and  factories  before  they  were 
ten.  And  now  reaction  has  set  in — rather  terribly 
— but  thank  God  we  are  not  any  more  going  to 
spend  all  our  lives  padding  our  chairs,  filling  our 


24  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

bellies,  and  inventing  machinery  for  making  every¬ 
thing  plentiful  and  cheap. 

Let  it  be  clear,  however,  that  this  is  not 
an  unqualified  plea  for  the  present  undisciplined 
demand  for  amusement.  It  is  only  a  plea  that  we 
recognise  as  an  element  in  the  modern  temper  and 
revolt  a  vague  sense  of  the  worth  of  certain  things 
which  are  indeed  worthy,  and  whose  worth  both 
public  opinion  and  evangelical  teaching  have  failed 
to  recognise.  And  the  element  in  it  that  is  good 
must  be  not  only  admitted,  but  made  the  starting 
point  for  a  process  of  spiritual  education.  In  the 
love  of  dance  and  drama,  and  the  interest  in  pretty 
clothes  and  gay  companionship,  the  starved  aesthetic 
sense  is  finding  its  first  crude  expression.  And  the 
aesthetic  value  in  life,  as  Clutton-Brock  is  insisting, 
is  a  fundamental  thing,  an  absolute  value,  a  spiritual 
ultimate.  To  deny  or  to  ignore  it  is  to  foreclose 
the  possibility  of  an  all-round  spiritual  development 
for  many,  and  to  discredit  one’s  own  spiritual 
authority  into  the  bargain.  Those  who  have 
savoured  the  fundamental  good  in  art  and  music 
(even  maybe  in  the  crude  arts  of  jazz  dancing  and 
dressing  for  the  part)  are  right  in  their  instinctive 
feeling  that  those  who  belittle  these  things  have  a 
perverted  sense  of  what  is  really  good.  Their 
spiritual  education  must  come  partly  through  the 
education  of  their  aesthetic  sense.  Starved  and 
unsatisfied,  the  aesthetic  hunger  will  continually 
thwart  the  development  of  the  spirit  ;  recognised 
and  guided  it  may  be  an  avenue  to  a  well-propor¬ 
tioned  spiritual  development. 

Grant  but  the  worthiness  of  even  a  part  of  this 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


25 


desire  for  joy  and  beauty,  and  though  we  may 
regret  the  extent  to  which  it  cuts  out  other  and 
ampler  ideals,  we  can  acquit  the  youth  of  to-day 
of  any  unforgivable  sin.  We  can  deal  with  the 
matter  once  we  understand  and  sympathise.  If 
we  reflect  how  abruptly  youth  has  awakened  to  the 
extraordinary  capacity  of  mankind  for  finding 
enjoyment  and  the  extraordinary  fruitfulness  of  the 
world  in  yielding  means  to  satisfy  that  taste  for 
joy,  we  shall  not  wonder  if  it  is  doing  so  heedlessly, 
breathlessly,  without  taking  time  for  serious  re¬ 
flection.  But  does  this  indicate  a  fundamentally 
selfish  and  materialistic  outlook,  a  set  opposition 
to  altruism  or  religion,  an  antipathy  to  the  true 
love  of  God  or  man  ?  Surely  this  is  not  the  case. 
Youth  has  indeed  found  a  new  dimension  in  its 
capacity  for  enjoyment  ;  but  youth  has  not  com¬ 
mitted  itself  to  taking  its  enjoyment  selfishly,  or 
continuing  to  take  it  superficially.  If,  then,  we 
are  to  win  the  enthusiasm  of  youth  we  must  not 
frown  upon  this  present  mood,  but  build  upon  it, 
interpreting  it,  and  showing  how  it  may  be  fitted 
in  as  a  true  part  of  a  bigger  whole.  In  the  main, 
I  believe  that  the  typical  young  folk  inside  the 
Church  share  this  sense  of  the  goodness  of  the 
material  life  with  those  outside  it,  and  that  they 
are  unable  to  regard  it  as  fundamentally  at  enmity 
with  the  best  and  highest  life.  The  majority  are 
so  persuaded  of  this  that  they  are  only  capable  of 
being  won  to  the  highest  by  a  hearty  recognition 
of  the  goodness,  in  its  own  order,  of  the  life  to  which 
they  are  already  drawn. 

May  we  not  also  set  with  this  pleasure-loving 


26  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

characteristic  of  modern  youth  the  fact  that  it 
is  strongly  moved  by  the  sufferings  of  those  who 
are  shut  out  of  their  natural  inheritance  of  joy  ? 
It  is  strongly  sympathetic  with  any  who  are 
treated  with  tyranny  or  cruelty.  It  is  given  to 
indignation  against  wrong.  It  is  often  secretly 
oppressed  with  the  kink  in  the  nature  of  things 
which  seems  to  establish  so  much  oppression  and 
hardship  in  the  structure  of  social  life.  Often  it  is 
less  indifferent  than  paralysed  by  the  spectacle  of 
evil  against  which  so  little  seems  to  be  able  to  be 
done.  What  power  on  earth,  it  thinks,  can  stand 
up  to  the  tragedy  of  Russian  famine  and  Irish 
anarchy,  and  the  present  tragically  low  standard 
of  earnings  of  the  South  Wales  miners  ?  It  is  not 
proved  yet  that  the  typical  representatives  of  youth 
to-day  would  not  be  ready  to  forego  much  of  their 
pleasure  if  they  could  thereby  ensure  a  more  decent 
distribution  of  the  good  things  of  life  which  they 
have  themselves  learned  to  appreciate.  But  they 
are  not  getting  a  lead  to  do  so.  They  are  not 
getting  the  motive  of  religion  harnessed  to  their 
instinctive  sympathy. 

The  practical  ideal  of  unselfishness  that  should  be 
commended  to  folk  with  such  an  outlook  is  the  ideal 
of  placing  a  physically  good  life  within  the  reach 
of  all.  Its  first  principle,  morally  and  spiritually, 
must  be  sharing,  and  sharing  not  of  spiritual  goods 
in  abstraction  from  material  goods,  but  of  material 
goods  with  all  the  spiritual  values  that  inhere  in 
them  when  they  are  shared.  The  moral  passion 
we  ought  to  aim  at  arousing  in  the  typical  repre¬ 
sentative  of  this  generation  is  a  passion  for  realising 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


27 


the  social  brotherhood  of  man,  not  as  a  mere 
sentiment,  but  as  an  actual  sharing  of  the  world’s 
material  goods  and  of  the  control  of  its  material 
processes.  The  Spirit  of  God  is  striving  with  this 
generation  to  find  an  economic  expression  of  brother¬ 
hood,  with  political  arrangements  making  that 
economic  brotherhood  secure,  and,  therefore,  the 
only  religious  movement  for  the  day  is  one  that  is 
closely  intertwined  with  the  attempt  to  realise  this 
ideal.  If  then  we  find  a  high  value  attached  by 
this  generation  to  material  things,  we  should  not 
spend  our  time  lamenting  it  ;  but  should  be  quick 
to  turn  it  to  advantage  for  the  realisation  of  some 
great  new  expression  of  the  ideal  of  brotherhood, 
some  great  new  effort  to  establish  the  Kingdom  of 
God  upon  earth. 

This  generation  is  indeed  unlikely  to  accept 
a  religion  which  takes  a  negative  attitude  towards 
the  material  and  the  physical,  and  centres  its 
morality  in  the  endeavour  to  keep  the  spirit  of  the 
individual  disentangled  from  the  interests  of  the 
flesh.  It  needs  a  religion  which  will  enable  men  to 
possess  the  world  and  use  it  to  the  full,  not  selfishly, 
but  with  all-round  good-will.  It  cannot  take 
seriously  the  ascetic  ideal  of  those  who  seem  more 
bent  on  teaching  people  to  be  restrained  and 
thoughtful  than  on  helping  them  to  make  each 
other  happy.  If  it  is  to  be  persuaded  to  devote 
itself  to  the  service  of  others,  it  must  be  allowed  to 
serve  them  first  by  making  the  world  a  pleasant 
place  for  all.  It  is  only  a  minority  of  mankind  whose 
altruism  can  or  should  express  itself  chiefly  in  the 
care  of  other  people’s  minds  and  morals.  Of  course, 


28  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

up  to  a  point,  we  are  all  our  brother’s  keepers  both 
morally  and  spiritually.  But  the  proportion  of 
life  is  lost  if  we  are  all  of  us  asked  to  exercise  our¬ 
selves  primarily  for  each  other’s  mental  develop¬ 
ment  and  good  behaviour.  That  is  the  teacher’s 
and  the  parson’s  speciality,  and  an  hotmurable  one. 
But  we  should  hardly  expect  that  people  whose 
lives  are  spent  for  the  most  part  in  making  or 
distributing  material  things  should  develop  par¬ 
ticularly  along  those  lines.  For  the  majority, 
surely,  their  altruism  ought  to  express  itself  mainly, 
at  first,  in  the  sharing  of  material  happiness  of  a 
well-chosen  kind. 

It  might  seem  as  if  we  were  recommending  a 
course  of  life  which  involves  no  moral  discipline 
and  no  spiritual  development,  but  is  this  so  ? 
Enlist  the  young  of  the  world,  first  of  all,  in  the 
enterprise  of  sharing  the  good  things  of  the  world, 
and  much  more  will  follow.  The  appeal  to  make 
service  their  serious  aim  in  life,  being  one  that  they 
can  understand,  is  one  to  which  they  will  respond, 
and  service  will  presently  call  for  its  own  discipline 
to  make  it  efficient  and  successful.  Then,  too,  if 
the  business  of  enjoyment  be  taken  seriously  it 
proves  to  be  a  rudimentary  art  which  can  be  so 
cultivated  that  it  discloses  spiritual  values,  and 
demands  a  discipline  of  its  own.  Moral  and 
spiritual  choices  are  called  for,  and  moral  and 
spiritual  growth  is  engendered  if  recreation  is 
recognised  as  an  important  segment  of  the  whole 
circle  of  life,  in  which  there  are  ideals  to  be  upheld. 

If  young  people  can  be  thus  enlisted  for  ideals 
which  they  can  understand,  and  in  which  ultimate 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


29 


values  are  at  stake,  they  will  be  prepared  to  face 
odds  and  difficulties  when  these  occur.  The  diffi¬ 
culties  will  show  themselves  in  a  thousand  forms, 
from  the  difficulty  of  teaching  uncivilised  hooligans 
to  play  the  game  in  sport  to  the  difficulty  of  teach¬ 
ing  profiteering  magnates  and  domineering  foremen 
to  play  the  game  in  industry.  And  when  these 
difficulties  bar  the  way  to  ideals  which  they  have 
made  their  own,  they  wall  be  ready  to  accept  the 
discipline  that  is  necessary  in  order  to  overcome 
them.  They  will  discover  that  the  conflicts  which 
are  involved  in  carrying  their  ideal  through  are 
spiritual,  and  will  then  be  in  a  position  to  learn 
from  Jesus,  and  from  the  Cross,  the  terms  on  which 
alone  the  battle  with  evil  can  be  successfully  won. 
But  they  will  not  be  launched  on  this  voyage  of 
spiritual  discovery  at  all  if  they  are  first  required 
to  discount  their  sense  of  life’s  values,  because 
religious  people  say  they  should.  So,  then,  the 
challenge  of  Christ  to  youth  should  be  presented, 
not  first  of  all  in  terms  of  the  inner  discipline  and 
sacrifice  that  it  may  in  the  end  involve,  but  first 
of  all  as  a  call  to  unselfish  service  and  enjoyment. 
In  the  name  of  Christ,  let  us  give  youth  a  charge 
to  take  up  that  task,  and  a  promise  of  His  help  in 
their  endeavour.  Once  they  embark  upon  it,  we 
shall  find  that  all  the  energies  they  derive  from  their 
natural  self-expression  in  the  form  of  play  will  be 
available  for  the  cause  of  the  Kingdom  of  Christ  ; 
and  in  place  of  undue  self-expression  and  egotism, 
there  will  be  that  consecration  of  human  instincts 
which,  it  has  been  said,  is  the  very  essence  of 
Christianity. 


30  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 


II.  The  Revolt  against  Conventionality 

A  second  mark  of  the  modern  revolt  against 
religion  can  be  more  briefly  dealt  with,  for  it  is  more 
generally  understood  ;  viz.,  the  revolt  against  con¬ 
ventional  morality.  Undoubtedly,  the  modern  mind 
is  now  in  open  revolt  against  taboos  of  every 
kind.  If  a  moral  precept  is  right,  it  will  be  able  to 
justify  itself.  So  runs  the  argument  ;  and  it  avails 
little  to  point  out  that  it  may  need  mature  ex¬ 
perience  to  appreciate  the  value  of  certain  precepts 
and  appeals.  Youth  will  not  ever  listen  to  its 
mentors  very  readily,  and  still  less  in  a  day  like  ours, 
when  the  accepted  moral  wisdom  of  the  world  has 
been  so  seriously  called  in  question  by  the  failure 
of  civilisation  to  eliminate  industrial  and  inter¬ 
national  strife.  Youth  may  not  estimate  the 
wisdom  of  its  elders  as  highly  as  it  would  if  it  knew 
more  of  the  burden  and  complexity  of  affairs.  But 
that  is  not  to  be  expected.  The  point  of  which 
youth  is  quite  sure  at  present  is  that  age  is  very 
fallible  and  the  morality  of  the  elders  far  from  a 
complete  success.  Having  been  tumbled  first  into 
a  world  of  war,  and  next  into  a  world  of  social 
disorganisation,  youth  is  inclined  to  wonder  if  all 
the  morality  of  its  monitors  is  not  fumbling  and 
merely  traditional.  It  is  not  contended  that  this 
is  an  explicit  line  of  argument  ;  the  main  currents 
of  the  arguments  which  sway  the  judgments  of  a 
generation  run  underground,  but  this  is  the  fair 
logic  of  events.  So  when  morality  says  of  any 
practice  nothing  more  than  “  don’t,”  youth  says, 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


31 


“  Be  hanged  to  you,  why  shouldn’t  I  ?  ”  And  the 
moralists  of  this  generation  have,  as  we  know,  been 
caught  in  this  way  without  a  reasoned  answer  to 
the  revolt  against  some  of  the  most  sacred  of  our 
moral  maxims.  Not  even  in  such  fundamental 
matters  as  the  sanctity  of  marriage  and  the  limits 
of  sex  intercourse  will  the  more  venturesome  take 
rulings  without  reasons,  and  not  even  in  these 
fundamental  matters  is  the  wisdom  of  the  elders 
dear  and  convincing  and  direct. 

Instinctively,  youth  to-day  judges  morality  by 
its  broad  social  outcome,  and  asks  of  the  traditional 
morality  whether  or  not  it  ministers  to  human  good. 
On  that  showing,  the  majority  of  those  who  are 
morally  alert  give  judgment  against  the  morality 
which  underlies  the  organisation  of  modern 
industrial  and  international  society.  The  intel¬ 
lectual  leaders  of  the  youth  of  the  world  of  all 
classes  do  not  believe  that  the  current  organisation 
of  business  or  of  nations  is  consistent  either  with 
Christianity  or  with  common  sense.  The  estab¬ 
lished  morality  seems  to  them  to  be  grounded  on  an 
outworn  tradition.  It  is  not  a  morality  dictated 
by  considerations  of  universal  kindness.  It  seems 
rather  to  be  dictated  by  considerations  of  self- 
preservation — moral  self-preservation  doubtless,  but 
still  self-preservation.  It  is  of  the  “  touch  not, 
taste  not,  handle  not  ”  order,  the  aim  of  it  being  to 
save  one’s  own  skin.  For  youthful  idealists  it  is 
too  selfish,  too  cautious,  too  prone  to  refuse  the 
joys  of  the  moment  for  the  sake  of  more  dubious 
joys  to  come.  We  may  argue  that  the  vast  majority 
of  the  youth  of  all  classes  are  not  youthful  idealists. 


32  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

and  will  not,  therefore,  hold  or  be  influenced  by  these 
views,  so  that  the  adverse  verdict  of  a  minority 
does  not  signify.  But  it  does  :  for  these  are  the 
natural  leaders  of  their  contemporaries,  and  their 
moral  judgment  is  of  far  more  moment  than  the 
moral  judgment  of  the  elders. 

Once  again,  it  is  not  pretended  that  the  instinc¬ 
tive  moral  standards  of  youth  are  more  satisfactory 
than  the  traditional  moral  standards  of  age.  They 
are,  on  the  contrary,  dangerously  short-sighted, 
dangerously  doctrinaire,  and  dangerously  partisan. 
Even  the  ideals  of  those  w*ho  are  morally  serious  are 
apt  to  make  class  interests  their  horizon.  In  many 
quarters  we  have  to  face  the  perverse  opposition 
of  minds  which  have  been  thoroughly  embittered 
by  the  past.  But  whilst  these  complicate  the 
problem,  they  do  not  constitute  its  main  feature. 
The  common  attitude  is  one  of  quite  dispassionate 
aloofness,  and  frank  but  good-natured  disregard  of 
all  that  religion  has  to  say,  due  to  our  failure  to  think 
out  and  proclaim  a  system  of  Christian  conduct 
wThich  will  do  justice  to  all  the  legitimate  appetites 
of  human  nature  and  cover  all  the  major  needs  of 
social  life.  This  generation  has  not  been  convinced 
by  Christianity  because  it  has  come  to  them 
'practically  associated  with  a  morality  of  taboos, 
timidity,  and  fear ;  theoretically  associated  with  a 
morality  of  love  which  they  have  not  seen  courage¬ 
ously  applied  to  public  life,  and  which,  indeed,  their 
elders  (whether  they  be  pious  or  pagan)  tell  them 
will  not  work.  If  this  is  an  exaggeration,  it  is  an 
exaggeration  which  contains  a  profound  truth. 
Christianity  seems  to  the  more  thoughtful  to  be 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


33 


associated  in  practice  with  a  morality  which  is 
discredited,  and  in  theory  with  a  morality  which 
Christians  do  not  consistently  avow.  For  the  less 
thoughtful  it  is  associated  with  a  morality  which 
limits  itself  to  a  few  phases  of  life  and  is  blind  to 
many  of  the  values  of  life  which  seem  to  them  real 
and  of  good  report.  The  preaching  of  the  Gospel 
to  the  multitude,  therefore,  demands  a  far  more 
explicit  conception  of  the  Christian  life  and  how  it 
is  to  be  lived,  happily  and  effectively,  amid  the 
ordinary  demands  of  social  and  industrial  life. 

Multitudes  of  Christian  teachers  and  preachers 
there  doubtless  are,  whose  teaching  and  preaching 
is  free  from  the  blemishes  which  give  rise  to  these 
misunderstandings  of  Christianity.  It  is  they  who 
are  carrying  on  the  bulk  of  the  real  and  effective 
evangelistic  work  of  the  present  day.  But  they  are 
apt  to  class  themselves,  and  to  be  classed,  as 
educators  rather  than  evangelists,  and  to  leave  the 
work  of  evangelism  to  others.  They  do  not  bring 
this  message  to  the  street  corners.  Indeed,  it  is 
generally  true  that  those  who  have  the  broader 
Christian  conception  of  life  are  leaving  the  more 
aggressive  work  of  evangelism  to  others.  There  is 
much  in  the  nature  of  the  modern  approach  to 
account  for  this,  but  it  is  not  satisfactory.  It  calls 
for  redress.  The  modern  message  needs  a  sharper 
evangelistic  edge.  And  one  of  the  essentials  for 
this  is  the  articulation  of  a  much  more  clear-cut 
conception  of  the  principles  on  which  Christian 
people  ought  to  conduct  themselves,  both  with 
regard  to  their  work  and  with  regard  to  their 
leisure.  To  be  a  Christian  a  man  must  be 


D 


34  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

converted  to  Christ’s  standard  of  values  explicitly  in 
relation  to  each  of  the  great  spheres  of  his  interest 
and  action.  Conversion  implies  the  exchange  of 
one  moral  conception  of  life  for  another.  Con¬ 
viction  of  sin,  repentance,  consecration — all  these, 
to  be  really  effective,  need  to  be  not  vague  and 
general  in  their  content,  but  quite  specific.  They 
call  for  a  more  decisively  Christian  conception  of  life. 

III.  The  Disavowal  of  the  Church’s 

Leadership 

We  come  now  to  the  third  mark  of  the  modern 
revolt  against  religion — the  disavowal  of  the 
Church’s  spiritual  authority.  The  Christian  con¬ 
ception  of  life  is  of  course  much  more  than  a  moral 
conception,  though  moral  factors  enter  into  it.  It 
must  be  a  spiritual  conception.  We  cannot  be 
content  merely  with  right  standards  of  conduct. 
Work  and  play  and  family  life  have  their  material 
sides  and  their  earthly  values,  but  they  have  also 
their  spiritual  side  and  their  eternal  values.  We 
need  to  bring  these  out,  teaching  men  to  work  and 
play  together,  and  to  love  one  another  in  ways  that 
recognise  that  this  world  is  only  an  episode  in  the 
life  of  our  spirits,  that  we  are  each  and  all  denizens 
of  eternity,  with  immortal  spirits  made  for  spiritual 
communion  with  one  another  and  with  the  Father 
from  Whom  came  our  being.  But  we  must  face 
the  fact  that  the  testimony  to  the  eternal  values 
of  the  unseen  world,  as  it  is  given  by  the  Church 
to-day,  is  already  partly  discredited  by  the  Church’s 
failure  to  appreciate  truly  the  values  of  the  things 
of  time  and  sense.  How  shall  we  expect  from  the 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


35 


multitude  a  ready  credence  for  our  teaching  of  the 
joys  of  communion  with  God,  and  the  assurance  of 
immortality  when  we  have  proved  faltering  and 
unreliable  guides  in  matters  more  within  their 
present  knowledge  and  discretion  ? 

Were  but  the  youth  of  to-day  approached  along 
the  lines  suggested,  I  believe  that  in  the  main  they 
would  respond  eagerly  to  the  deeper  message  of 
the  Church.  For  there  is  behind  their  superficial 
absorption  in  activity  and  amusement  a  hunger  for 
a  more  satisfying  conception  of  life.  They  are 
driven  to  find  sensuous  satisfaction  in  pleasure,  in 
part  because  they  can  find  so  little  spiritual  satis¬ 
faction  in  work.  It  is  in  the  recoil  from  forms  of 
activity  which  have  no  moral  attraction  and  no 
spiritual  purpose  that  they  plunge  into  forms  of 
recreation  which  have  so  little  of  either  spiritual  or 
moral  worth.  But  they  are  not  deeply  satisfied 
with  their  choice.  They  cannot  rescind  it  because 
it  is  based  in  deep  instincts  which  they  cannot 
ignore  ;  and  they  cannot,  therefore,  turn  sincerely  to 
a  religious  ideal  which  takes  no  real  account  of  these. 
At  the  same  time  they  hunger  for  something  more. 
They  want  their  passion  to  make  life  good  inter¬ 
preted  to  them  in  spiritual  terms.  They  want  to 
learn  the  spiritual  conditions  by  which  alone  they 
can  make  good  for  themselves,  and  in  their  relations 
with  each  other,  boy  with  girl,  and  friend  with 
friend.  Along  these  lines  they  are  more  than 
ready  to  enter  Christ’s  Kingdom  ;  but  they  must 
be  taken  where  they  stand  and  shown  how  the  good 
they  already  know  leads  on  to  the  larger  deeper 
good  for  which  as  yet  they  only  grope  and  hunger. 


36  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

We  have  to  consider  how  much  there  is  in  the 
Christian  message  which  is  strange  and  terrifying. 
We  owe  it  to  youth  to  make  our  account  of 
it  credible  by  first  making  cogent  and  satisfying 
that  part  of  it  which  is  nearest  the  edge  of  their 
comprehension. 

We  must  also  remember  that  the  modern  person 
is  the  product  of  a  century  of  tremendous  absorp¬ 
tion  in  practical  achievement,  during  which  a 
scientific  view  of  the  world  has  come  to  be  character¬ 
istic  of  every  normal  citizen.  He  is  quite  sure  of 
the  reality  of  the  world  of  matter,  and  not  nearly 
so  sure  of  the  reality  of  the  world  of  spirit.  The 
precision  of  man’s  knowledge  in  the  sphere  of 
material  things,  as  against  the  fluctuation  of  opinion 
in  the  sphere  of  spiritual  knowledge,  has  given  a 
sense  of  truth  to  the  one  and  a  suspicion  of  super¬ 
stition  or  mere  sentiment  to  the  other.  Then, 
again,  though  few  know  much  about  such  questions 
as  Biblical  criticism,  what  little  is  known  of  the 
Church’s  timidity  towards  them  heightens  the  sense 
of  dubiety  which  attaches  to  religious  propositions 
not  verifiable  by  experience.  And  with  the  general 
discredit  of  the  authority  of  the  Church,  authority 
and  the  power  of  influence  have  passed  to  those 
whose  reputation  is  strong  in  the  practical  conduct 
of  life,  and  so  the  man  in  the  street  takes  his  cue 
from  the  “  good  fellow”  rather  than  from  the  good 
Churchman.  His  philosophy  of  life  is  one  in  which 
abstract  religious  statements  and  the  common 
metaphors  of  religious  speech  mean  simply  nothing. 
To  the  modern  mind  no  general  statements  un¬ 
supported  by  illustration  carry  much  meaning, 


THOSE  WHO  PASS  BY 


37 


whether  they  are  on  religious  or  other  subjects. 
When,  then,  we  come  to  present  the  Gospel  to  such 
minds  we  need  to  be  careful  to  divest  it  of  its 
dependence  upon  systems  and  forms  of  thought 
which  are  unfamiliar  to  modern  minds,  and  which 
the  Church  has  no  longer  sufficient  authority  to 
impose  as  thought  forms  for  their  religious  life. 
It  is  desperately  important  that  a  man  should 
receive  his  highest  thought  in  the  terms  and  cate¬ 
gories  which  he  understands.  This  point  will  be 
of  great  importance  when  we  come,  as  we  do  in 
the  next  chapter,  to  outline  the  essential  message 
of  the  Gospel. 

For,  I  would  remind  the  reader  that  what 
we  have  been  considering  so  far  is  not  the  full 
message  of  the  Gospel,  but  only  some  of  the 
problems  of  relating  the  Gospel  to  the  stock  of 
ideas  which  is  present  in  the  minds  of  those  we  wish 
to  win.  Our  Gospel  offers  to  men  a  very  much 
fuller,  deeper,  and  richer  scheme  of  life  than  that 
which  is  held  by  those  who  now  so  easily  pass  it  by. 
But  if  the  presentation  of  it  is  to  convince  them, 
it  must  first  be  just  to  their  present  state  of  mind. 
It  must  acknowledge  the  good  in  all  those  good 
things  which  their  more  restricted  standards  claim 
to  be  good.  It  must  not  try  to  cry  up  the  value  of 
the  life  eternal  by  depreciating  the  value  of  things 
temporal.  It  must  not  decry  art  and  beauty,  nor 
exalt  self-purification  above  social  service.  It 
must  not  call  men  to  a  scheme  of  conduct  which  is 
essentially  ascetic  and  self-regarding.  All  these 
matters,  however,  important  as  they  are,  lie  rather 
on  the  circumference  than  at  the  centre  of  the 


38  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

Gospel.  The  Gospel  is  essentially  a  testimony  to 
certain  facts  of  history  and  truths  of  experience 
the  recognition  of  which  has  a  transforming  effect 
upon  human  life.  These  elements  of  historic  fact 
and  eternal  truth  in  the  Gospel  to  which  we  have  to 
testify,  we  cannot  alter  or  adapt  to  fit  the  changing 
needs  of  the  passing  generations.  We  can  only 
describe  them  as  matters  of  experience  and  leave 
them  to  make  their  own  impression.  We  shall  have 

X 

done  all  we  can  to  secure  them  a  hearing  if  wre  have 
tried,  before  describing  them,  to  look  at  life  through 
the  eyes  of  those  to  whom  our  witness  is  to  be  given. 
What  this  eternal  and  changeless  element  in  the 
Gospel  is,  we  shall  now  try  to  see,  and  to  state  in 
terms  which  the  modern  mind  can  understand. 


CHAPTER  III 


) 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER 

In  this  chapter  we  shall  try  to  present  the  basal 
elements  of  the  Gospel ;  separating  them  as  far 
as  we  can  from  the  metaphor  and  philosophy  of 
particular  ages  and  periods  in  the  Church’s  history. 
Doing  so,  we  find  the  Gospel  to  consist  in  these  four 
sets  of  facts  :  the  fact  of  Christ,  the  fact  of  de¬ 
liverance  from  sin,  the  fact  of  communion  with 
God,  and  the  fact  of  the  Church.  The  classification 
is  not  rigidly  logical  and  watertight  ;  but  it  may 
serve  for  purposes  of  exposition  without  leading  to 
practical  confusion. 

I.  The  Fact  of  Christ 

The  power  of  the  Gospel  lies  to-day,  as  always, 
in  the  attractive  power  of  Jesus  Christ.  It  is  He, 
and  not  our  theories  about  Him,  that  saves  men. 
We  are  always  saying  it,  but  cannot  too  vividly 
realise  what  we  say.  Particularly  important  to-day 
is  this  realisation  of  the  supremacy  of  the  Life  as 
seen  in  the  Gospel  portrait  over  the  subsequent 
systems  of  thought  in  which  men  have  interpreted 
what  Christ  meant  to  them  and  to  the  world  ;  for 

39 


40  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

to-day  the  theological  interpretation  of  Christ  is 
peculiarly  unconvincing  to  the  average  mind.  The 
average  person  has  extraordinarily  little  capacity 
for  abstract  thought  of  any  kind.  He  has  still 
less  capacity  for  assimilating  thought  expressed 
in  the  terms  of  an  unfamiliar  race  or  of  a  bygone 
age  :  and  such  is  very  much  of  the  Church’s  theology 
of  redemption.  The  Christian  doctrine  of  redemp¬ 
tion  is  commonly  set  out  in  metaphors  which  are 
difficult  except  to  those  who  are  interested  in  the 
history  of  thought.  Thus,  for  example,  the  explana¬ 
tion  of  redemption  in  terms  of  guilt  makes  use  of 
legal  metaphors  which  are  not  easily  understood  by 
a  nation  steeped  for  centuries  in  the  thought  of  the 
Fatherhood  of  God.  And  the  explanation  in  terms 
of  sacrifice  requires  some  knowledge  of  the  history 
of  the  place  of  sacrifice  in  primitive  religions  to 
make  it  cogent.  Those  who  are  devoted  Christians 
may  be  glad  to  wrestle  with  the  difficulties  of 
theology  :  yet  it  is  not  theology  but  Christ  as  a 
living  figure  who  draws  men  to  Himself.  Man  is 
so  constituted  that  he  can  best  see  what  it  is  worth 
while  to  do  and  to  be  when  the  ideal  is  presented  to 
him  in  a  life.  Compared  with  such  a  presentation, 
theology  is  impotent.  And  so  we  have  to-day,  as 
ever,  to  show  forth  Jesus  Christ,  the  Man  of  men, 
the  Man  of  God,  as  the  one  supreme  figure  with 
whom  all  men  have  to  reckon. 

Some  of  us  would  like  to  preach  Christ  to  men 
with  a  clear  word  as  to  how  He  would  solve  the 
public  problems  of  the  day.  We  would  like  to  be 
able  to  apply  His  teaching  decisively  in  all  direc¬ 
tions  ;  and  we  think  that  if  it  were  applied  correctly 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  41 

Christ  Himself  would  stand  forth  more  vividly 
before  men.  But  systems  of  Christian  ethics  are 
no  more  convincing  than  systems  of  Christian 
theology.  The  thought  of  the  centrality  of  Jesus 
requires  that  we  put  them  all  into  a  secondary  place. 
Christ  Himself  is  His  own  evidence.  His  own  words 
and  actions  among  the  peasantry  of  Galilee  and 
among  the  rulers  of  His  people  in  Jerusalem  ;  these 
set  Him  forth  in  His  essential  and  commanding 
majesty.  Even  in  His  own  day,  He  did  not  offer 
solutions  for  all  the  problems  of  the  hour — slavery, 
for  example — but  He  did  adopt  a  characteristic 
attitude  to  social  questions  and  social  parties,  and 
it  is  this  above  all  things  that  men  want  to  see 
in  Him. 

It  is  then  Jesus  that  we  need  to  show  forth  to¬ 
day, — Jesus  in  His  attitude  to  sickness,  to  suffering, 
to  poverty,  to  riches,  to  cruelty,  to  intolerance, 
to  entrenched  privilege,  to  hard-heartedness,  to 
hypocrisies  and  shams,  to  political  parties,  to 
governments,  to  ecclesiastical  pride  and  national 
ambition.  His  words  cannot  be  quoted  as  though 
they  apply  literally  to  modern  conditions  of  life, 
but  they  leave  no  doubt  as  to  where  He  stood  on 
all  essential  social  questions.  His  intense  sympathy 
with  suffering,  His  wrath  against  all  trifling  with 
human  need,  His  hatred  of  pretence  and  untruth. 
His  patience  writh  the  institutions  of  His  time, 
coupled  with  the  most  fearless  and  radical  criticism 
of  them,  His  complete  confidence  in  the  overthrow 
of  the  evil  in  them,  His  internationalism  in  the  face 
of  the  most  bigoted  and  religious  nationalism  the 
world  has  ever  seen  ;  all  these  things  stand  out 


42  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

with  vivid  clearness.  They  reveal  His  spirit  and 
nature  in  action  :  there  is  no  need  to  translate  them 
into  social  and  political  maxims  for  the  hour,  that 
would  be  to  detract  from  their  incisive  power  and 
not  to  add  to  it.  To  insist  on  the  letter  of  the  truth 
would  be  to  forget  the  freedom  of  the  spirit.  Each 
man  must  make  his  own  application  in  conduct  for 
himself ;  for  none  can  know  his  fellow  or  the 
cluster  of  circumstances  through  which  he  has  to 
cleave  his  way.  It  is  not  for  us  to  dictate  to  our 
neighbours  what  their  conduct  ought  to  be ;  and 
when  we  try  to  do  so,  we  only  induce  repulsion  and 
invite  debate  of  details. 

We  have,  then,  to  preach,  not  duties,  but  Jesus 
as  a  living  embodiment  of  amazing,  rousing,  and 
commanding  love,  in  social  situations  utterly 
relevant  to  ours  to-day,  challenging  every  kind  of 
person  to  awake  from  complacency  and  conven¬ 
tionality  and  play  the  brother  to  men.  It  is  not 
necessary,  nor  possible,  to  translate  Jesus  into  a 
new  political  code  :  it  is  only  and  supremely  essen¬ 
tial  to  see  Him  through  modern  eyes.  For  if  we 
are  insensitive  to  the  things  which  the  world  to-day 
values — in  its  best  and  most  characteristic  hours — 
we  shall  not  see  in  Jesus,  and  therefore  shall  not 
commend  to  others  the  very  things  about  Him 
which  would  win  their  admiration  at  the  outset. 
We  may  relieve  ourselves  of  the  responsibility  for 
solving  all  the  ethical  problems  of  the  day  before 
we  dare  to  preach  the  Gospel ;  but  we  must  be 
sensitive  to  these  problems  or  we  shall  seem  to  make 
Jesus  irrelevant  to  the  life  men  have  to  live. 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  43 

II.  The  Fact  of  Deliverance 

Of  those  who  have  put  on  record  a  vivid  ex¬ 
perience  of  the  Gospel,  most  have  emphasised  the 
moral  revolution  which  it  wrought  in  them.  They 
entered  into  the  experience  of  Christ  through  an 
experience  of  their  own  sinfulness  contrasting  with 
His  holiness,  or  of  their  own  incompleteness  con¬ 
trasting  with  His  fulness.  A  vivid  realisation  of 
the  moral  ideals  embodied  in  Jesus  filled  them 
with  a  sense  of  their  own  unworthiness  and  with 
a  desire  to  exchange  it  for  His  moral  excellence 
There  followed  an  experience  in  which  the  burden 
of  their  sinfulness  and  incompleteness  passed  away, 
and  they  were  left  with  a  surpassing  sense  of  new 
joy  and  energy  drawn  from  Him.  For  them, 
undoubtedly,  the  Christian  life  began  with  an 
experience  of  forgiveness  ;  but  are  we  therefore  to 
presume  that  it  always  should  begin  with  such  an 
experience  ?  Or  are  we  to  take  more  account  of 
the  numberless,  though  less  striking  instances  in 
Christian  biography,  and  within  our  own  present 
knowledge,  in  which  the  Christian  experience  began 
with  no  such  violence  of  recoil  from  the  past,  but 
rather  with  a  sense  of  warming  attraction  towards 
the  Christian  offer  of  a  more  beautiful,  more  noble, 
and  more  satisfying  life  ?  There  is  at  least  enough 
evidence  of  the  variety  of  the  types  of  experience  in 
which  Christ  is  central  to  allow  us  to  approach  the 
question  as  an  open  one. 

The  strongest  argument  for  making  the  presenta¬ 
tion  of  the  Gospel  turn  on  this  appeal  to  a  violent 
repentance  is  a  practical  one.  It  might  have  been 


44  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

said  by  the  evangelists  of  an  older  school  that  if 
conversion  to  Christ  is  to  be  wrought  in  a  revival 
meeting  and  in  an  hour,  as  sometimes  it  must,  it 
can  only  be  done  with  the  aid  of  some  strong 
emotional  excitement.  What  more  effective  from 
this  point  of  view  than  a  vivid  depiction  of  the  evil 
that  is  in  man  ?  Let  him  see  himself  as  he  is  at 
his  worst,  in  stark  contrast  with  his  ideal.  The 
question  is  not,  however,  to  be  judged  from  the 
standpoint  of  “  the  evangelist,”  but  from  the 
standpoint  of  youth.  If  the  natural  pathway  from 
the  current  types  of  paganism  to  Christian  disciple- 
ship  lies  through  a  strong  sense  of  sin,  wTell  and  good  : 
by  that  route  we  must  strive  to  lead  them  ;  but  not 
because  the  experience  of  forgiveness  has  been 
characteristic  of  the  great  revivals  of  the  past. 
For  us  the  question  is,  what  mental  route  or  process 
is  the  right  and  fitting  one  for  the  pilgrims  of  to-day  ? 
We  must  not  prescribe  for  them  an  unsuitable 
gateway  into  the  experience  of  being  a  Christian. 
We  must  rather  describe  that  experience  in  terms 
which  will  help  them  to  turn  their  faces  in  the 
direction  in  which  they  will  find  an  open  road. 

The  Christian  experience  may  be  variously 
described  as  one  of  forgiveness,  redemption,  recon¬ 
ciliation,  or  rebirth.  Put  in  its  most  simple  terms 
it  is  an  experience  of  inner  harmony  replacing  a 
state  of  inner  strife.  The  precise  form  which  the 
experience  takes  will  depend  upon  the  outstanding 
character  of  the  condition  which  immediately 
preceded  it.  If  this  has  been  one  of  moral  defeat — 
sav  from  an  ungovernable  temper  or  an  ungovern¬ 
able  lust — or  if  it  has  been  one  of  impotence  to  do 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  45 

the  good  one  would,  or  of  helplessness  in  face  of 
others’  need,  entrance  into  the  Christian  experience 
will  mean  primarily  a  new  access  of  moral  energy, 
either  for  defence  or  attack,  for  self-purification 
or  for  service.  The  experience  will  then  be  thought 
of  most  naturally  in  terms  of  rebirth  and  the  gift 
of  new  life.  If,  again,  the  immediate  past  has  been 
overshadowed  by  the  sense  of  having  incurred  the 
condemnation  of  God  for  moral  failure,  or  by  a 
sense  of  rebellion  against  the  conditions  and  obliga¬ 
tions  of  life,  and  revolt  against  God  as  their  Author, 
the  Christian  experience  will  be  felt  primarily  as 
one  of  forgiveness  and  reconciliation.  But  if  the 
transition  is  from  a  state  of  aimlessness  and  futility, 
and  want  of  a  co-ordinating  principle  to  give  life 
unity  and  purpose,  the  Christian  experience  will 
be  rather  that  of  adoption  into  the  service  of 
Christ. 

In  each  case  life  has  been  delivered  from  its 
inner  tension  and  disorder ;  but  whether  the 
experience  of  deliverance  is  thought  of  primarily 
in  terms  of  rebirth  or  reconciliation  or  of  adoption 
into  the  service  of  Christ,  it  is  well  to  realise  that  in 
none  of  these  cases  does  the  form  of  the  experience 
exhaust  its  content.  What  happens,  for  example, 
in  the  middle  instance  given  above,  is  more  than 
forgiveness  or  reconciliation,  which,  after  all,  are 
only  the  words  wdiich  indicate  the  contrast  between 
the  soul’s  previous  sense  of  guiltiness  or  enmity 
toward  God  and  its  new  state  of  content  and 
satisfaction.  The  invariable  fact  in  all  these 
experiences  is  that  whereas,  at  the  one  stage,  God 
was  felt  to  be  outside  our  lives  and  we  helpless, 


4 6  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

guilty,  estranged,  or  aimless  because  of  that,  God 
is  now  felt  to  have  become  a  fact  inside  our  ex¬ 
perience.  Because  of  that  fact  we  are  now  morally 
energised  and  delivered  from  our  former  fear  or 
hostility  toward  God,  and  are  enriched  by  the  gift 
of  a  purpose  large  enough  to  enlist  and  satisfy  our 
every  power.  Man  has  opened  the  door  and  God 
has  come  in  to  him.  He  is  known  to  be  one  near 
and  available,  friendly,  and  in  the  position  of  leader¬ 
ship  and  control.  We  have  the  Son  of  God  for 
our  Friend. 

The  Gospel  consists  in  the  blessed  fact  of  God’s 
will  to  enter,  and  man’s  ability  to  receive  God  into 
his  inner  life  ;  and  we  must  state  it  in  terms  which 
speak  to  the  condition  of  our  hearers.  We  need 
not  try  to  induce  in  them  any  particular  condi¬ 
tion  of  self-dissatisfaction  of  which  they  are  not 
conscious,  still  less  to  insist  on  their  experiencing  a 
sense  of  need  which,  to  them,  seems  artificial. 
There  is  surely  in  every  human  life  already  some 
need  to  which  the  fundamental  Christian  experience 
answers.  We  have  to  discover  the  prevailing  form 
of  it  in  our  own  day,  and  among  whatever  class  of 
people  we  are  trying  to  reach.  I  have  already  tried 
to  analyse  what  I  think  to  be  the  especial  spiritual 
sensitiveness  of  the  hour.  In  the  light  of  that 
analysis,  it  does  not  seem  possible  to  insist  upon 
or  to  expect  in  young  people  of  the  present  day  any 
strong  sense  of  guilt  or  of  hostility  to  God. 

The  sense  of  guilt  is  compounded  of  two  notions  : 
the  sense  of  having  grievously  offended  a  binding 
moral  code,  and  the  expectation  that  penalties 
will  be  exacted.  Neither  of  these  notions  is  power- 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  47 

ful  in  the  common  thought  of  the  day.  Present 
modes  of  thought  throw  much  new  light  on  the 
responsibility  of  the  individual  for  his  own  action. 
Drunkenness,  lust,  bad  temper,  lying,  and  the  rest 
— to-day  are  all  regarded  as  being  diseases  as 
much  as  individual  faults.  At  least,  the  individual 
is  felt  to  share  his  responsibility  for  them  rather 
lavishly  with  his  heredity  and  his  environment. 
The  current  analysis  may  exaggerate  the  part  played 
in  each  individual  destiny  by  these  other  supra- 
individual  factors,  but  thev  are  real  factors  of  which 
too  little  has  been  made  in  the  past.  To  require 
the  individual  exactly  to  separate  out  his  own 
individual  responsibility  from  the  wider  responsi¬ 
bility  of  mankind  is  not  desirable  if  it  can  be  avoided, 
as  I  think  it  can.  By  all  means  let  us  emphasise 
a  man’s  share  in  the  responsibility  for  the  present 
and  the  future,  and  especially  for  the  next  step  ; 
but  do  not  let  us  seek  to  induce  that  sense  of  lonely 
guilt  which  was  such  an  outstanding  mark  of  the 
great  Christian  experience  of  the  past. 

The  modern  sense  of  divided  responsibility  for 
the  past  has  also  a  further  result.  It  makes  it 
difficult  for  the  modern  person  to  imagine  himself 
standing  as  a  criminal  before  a  Judge,  without 
detracting  from  his  conception  of  the  kindness  and 
the  justice  of  Almighty  God.  He  will  confess 
himself  a  rotter  and  a  weakling,  but  it  is  another 
matter  to  regard  himself  guilty  of  the  pains  of  hell. 
He  may  be  made  to  feel  the  terrible  possibilities  of 
evil  which  lie  in  his  nature  if  they  are  indulged, 
but  he  cannot  conceive  of  God  as  identified  with  the 
principle  of  condemnation.  Christ  has  taught  the 


48  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

world  too  well  for  us  to  suppose  that  He  will  not  be 
for  us  to  the  very  last.  If  we  are  to  stress  the  idea 
of  redemption  as  deliverance  from  sin,  we  must 
think  of  sin  more  often  in  Paul’s  thought  of  it  as 
disastrous  and  culpable  deficiency  than  in  his 
thought  of  it  as  legal  guilt.  And  in  so  doing  we 
shall  speak  to  the  condition  of  our  times.  The 
modern  need  is  typified  by  the  boy  who  has  made 
a  sorry  mess  of  his  scoutmastership  through 
thoughtlessness,  or  the  girl  who  is  disabled  by  her 
sense  of  instability  and  ineffectiveness,  rather  than 
by  the  man  or  woman  pursued  by  the  sense  of 
guilt  or  of  remorse. 

So  then  the  characteristic  spiritual  longing  of  the 
world  to-day  is  not  so  much  a  longing  to  be  blame¬ 
less,  as  a  longing  to  “  make  good.”  The  spirit 
yearns  less  to  escape  the  contamination  of  material 
interests  and  pursuits  than  to  put  the  impress  of  its 
ideals  upon  the  material  and  social  wrorld.  And  in 
this  aspiration  it  is  nearer  the  mind  of  Jesus  than 
it  has  ever  been  before,  for  the  religion  of  Jesus  was 
far  less  occupied  with  the  aim  of  self-purification 
than  with  the  aim  of  sympathetic  service.  Jesus 
never  encouraged  people  to  dwell  very  much  upon 
their  past  faults,  if  only  they  were  willing  to  start 
out  afresh  with  an  adequate  life  aim  and  an  adequate 
life  motive.  And  the  aim  and  the  motive  which 
He  commended  might  be  stated  very  simply,  in 
some  such  terms  as  these.  “  God  is  your  Father, 
man  is  your  brother,  the  world  might  be  very  good 
and  beautiful  but  at  present  it  is  very  dark  and  sad. 
Set  about  to  make  life  good  for  your  brother,  and 
God  will  take  care  of  you  all,  both  in  this  world  and 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  49 

in  the  next.  Your  past  may  have  been  full  of 
wickedness,  yet  you  may  leave  it  all  behind  if  you 
will  choose  me  for  your  Master  now.  Lose  your 
wrong  self  in  serving  your  brother  as  I  shall  show 
you  how.” 

And  here  it  is  that  Jesus  touches  our  deepest 
sense  of  need.  For  the  heart  of  the  world  stirs  to 
His  call  to  make  life  good  and  happy;  but  it  wearies, 
too,  with  its  sense  of  failure  to  achieve  its  aim. 
There  is  a  surging  passion  of  hope  in  the  hearts  of 
men  that  this  world  might  be  made  into  a  much 
more  happy  and  homely  place  for  all  men,  and  not 
only  for  those  few  who  are  fortunate  and  able — but 
the  hope  is  turned  to  ashes  wdien  we  contemplate 
the  failure  of  humanity  to  realise  its  dream.  Men 
need  Jesus  to  give  them  such  a  will  to  use  the  world 
rightly,  as  will  be  corrupted  neither  by  selfishness 
nor  by  sensuality,  nor  dissipated  by  weariness  and 
disappointment. 

Thus  the  heart  hungers  for  an  understanding 
of  the  things  of  the  spirit  which  will  not  set  the  rich 
appreciation  of  life  at  variance  with  the  love  of 
God,  and  for  a  power  to  turn  the  dream  of  human 
brotherhood  into  an  actualised  social  order.  Now 
these  two  things  have  been  met  in  Christ — in 
Christ,  though  not  in  Christians  generally.  Yet, 
for  some  at  least,  the  lovely  humanity  of  Jesus  has 
ended  the  war  between  the  love  of  human  happiness 
and  the  love  of  God  :  between  joy  in  the  world, 
beautiful  with  its  profusion  of  gifts  of  light  and 
colour  and  gaiety,  and  joy  in  the  perfect  ordering 
of  the  spiritual  life.  This  harmonisation  of  the 
various  hungers  of  the  spirit,  this  resolution  of  the 

E 


So  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

conflict  between  the  lure  of  the  natural  and  the 
lure  of  the  spiritual,  is  part  of  the  experience  of 
multitudes  of  Christian  people.  Those  who  have 
this  experience  have  a  gospel  for  the  present 
age,  and  those  who  have  not  this  experience  have 
not. 

And,  further,  there  are  those  who  have,  in  their 
own  experience,  an  attitude  to  their  fellows,  born 
of  their  fellowship  with  Christ,  which  makes  them 
sure  that  the  problem  of  organising  the  world  as  a 
social  brotherhood  is  no  vain  dream.  They  can 
look  along  the  line  of  their  own  inner  development 
and  see  how  the  will  to  dominate  and  despise  and 
exploit  others  passes  away  before  the  desire  to 
understand  and  serve  and  equip  them.  And  they 
can  see  that  the  new  will  to  love  which  is  thus  born 
in  them  is  more  resourceful,  more  determined,  more 
constantly  energised  by  deep  satisfaction  in  success, 
and  therefore  more  potent  against  difficulties  and 
more  resilient  after  failure,  than  the  old  will  to  fight 
for  one’s  own  hand.  And  knowing  this  in  some 
measure  by  experience  in  themselves  and  others, 
they  see  that  the  Kingdom  of  God  canot  fail  to 
come,  and  in  this  respect  also  the  stress  of  fear  and 
doubt  is  resolved  in  their  souls.  Thev  are  delivered, 
reborn,  released  from  the  thraldom  of  any  desires 
whose  satisfaction  ends  in  themselves  alone.  The 
Kingdom  of  God  is  within  them.  They  are  become 
the  sons  of  God  in  that  they  share  the  Father’s 
purpose  and  freely  desire  to  forward  it,  and  in  so 
far  as  this  is  so,  they  have  a  gospel  of  redemption 
for  their  day. 

The  witness  of  the  Gospel  to  man’s  deliverance 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  51 

from  sin  thus  takes  a  special  character  from  the 
special  form  of  man’s  present  need  and  aspiration. 
Our  deliverance  in  Christ  is  not  primarily  to  be 
represented  as  a  deliverance  from  past  sins’  conse¬ 
quences,  nor  as  the  breaking  of  the  power  of  present 
temptation  to  lust  or  excess  :  it  is  still  more  a 
deliverance  out  of  a  life  of  loneliness  and  from  a 
use  of  the  world  which  ministered  to  mere  pride 
and  selfishness  into  a  life  of  social  service  and  a 
use  of  the  world  which  ministers  to  the  satisfaction 
of  every  hunger  of  an  awakened  personality.  This 
leads  us  on  to  fresh  points  about  the  nature  of  the 
Christian  life. 

III.  The  Fact  of  Communion  with  God 

We  have  now  to  speak  of  the  fact  of  Com¬ 
munion  with  God,  which  constitutes  a  large  element 
of  the  Christian  witness,  appealing  as  it  does  to 
the  sense  of  loneliness,  impotence,  and  futility, 
which  haunts  humanity.  It  is  one  of  the  change¬ 
less  facts  of  Christian  experience  that  the  soul  can 
enjoy  such  an  intimate  communion  with  God  as 
takes  awTay  the  sense  of  spiritual  loneliness  and 
gives  enduring  value  to  the  whole  of  life.  One  of 
the  features  of  adolescence  is  its  sense  of  being  on 
the  edge  of  great  experiences  and  of  finding  ex¬ 
perience  constantly  dissatisfying,  of  being  called 
co  great  achievement  and  being  doomed  to  feeble¬ 
ness.  Communion  with  God,  in  little  things  and  in 
big,  is  the  remedy  for  this. 

In  the  great  classic  instances,  Christian  com¬ 
munion  with  God  takes  several  leading  forms.  Now, 


52  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

it  is  a  re-enforcement  in  fighting  individual  tempta¬ 
tion  ;  now  it  is  a  companionship  in  making  known 
the  Gospel ;  now  it  is  a  sharing  of  God’s  Passion 
to  save  the  world  from  loss.  The  Christian  witness 
needs  to  be  more  full  and  emphatic  and  specific 
in  its  testimony,  both  to  the  reality  and  to  the  range 
of  this  experience  of  contact  with  God  Himself. 
Moreover,  in  witnessing  to  the  immature,  we  must 
not  confine  ourselves  to  the  maturer  elements 
in  this  experience.  To  what  did  Jesus  call  His 
followers  in  the  first  instance  ?  Was  it  to  a  life  of 
desperate  conflict  with  the  ranked  forces  of  evil  ? 
Or  was  it  not  rather  to  a  thrilling  ministry  of  social 
service,  to  a  joyful  companionship  and  a  dazzling 
prospect  of  signal  human  success  ?  He  taught 
them  to  rejoice  in  the  flowers,  to  steal  out  into  the 
night  for  quiet  thought,  to  frequent  the  wedding 
feast,  to  taste  fife’s  sweetness  with  Him  and  with 
His  followers,  to  be  care-free  and  adventurous. 
Without  doubt  His  call  to  them  was  from  the  first 
a  call  to  an  arduous  enterprise,  but  not  at  all  a 
recondite  enterprise,  not  a  campaign  whose  objects 
and  rewards  were  obscure,  or  intangible,  or  divorced 
from  sense  experience  and  daily  fife.  Nor  was 
the  note  of  sacrifice  predominant  at  the  first, 
though  the  note  of  fidelity  was  always  present  in 
His  call  to  men.  Only  after  a  considerable  experi¬ 
ence  of  His  companionship  did  He  ask  them  to  go 
up  to  Jerusalem  to  witness  His  Passion,  and  to 
only  a  few  of  them  did  He  reveal  the  fiercest 
conflicts  of  His  soul  in  Gethsemane’s  Garden. 
Surely  there  are  many  of  our  younger  brothers  and 
sisters  to  whom  we  should  offer  simply  Christ’s 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  53 

companionship  in  the  enjoyment  of  life  and  the 
fulfilling  of  kindly  offices  of  service,  and  wait  long 
before  we  ask  them  to  fight  His  hardest  battles. 

The  warfare  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  demands 
discipline  and  evokes  heroism  ;  and  we  should  not 
hide  the  fact,  but  neither  should  we  forget  that 
there  are  some  who  find  the  greater  part  of  their 
companionship  with  Him  in  art  and  music  and  the 
search  for  truth,  in  the  service  of  the  home,  or  in 
the  common  ministries  of  human  life.  These  things 
are  by  Him  touched  with  new  values,  new  meanings, 
new  emotions.  Of  course  we  must  summon  Christ’s 
disciples  always  to  the  work  of  building  up  in 
Christ’s  name  a  Kingdom  of  God  upon  earth  ;  but 
we  must  offer  them  communion  with  God,  not  only 
in  fighting  for  ideals  against  opponents,  or  in 
fighting  for  deliverance  from  sin,  but  in  building 
good  houses,  planting  delightful  gardens,  making 
beautiful  clothes,  and  in  other  ways  ministering 
to  the  joyfulness  of  life.  These  things  are  a  part 
of  His  Kingdom,  and  in  them  we  have  communion 
with  Him  who  created  all  things  and  delighted  to 
pronounce  them  good.  We  must  not  allow  the 
thought  of  communion  with  God  to  be  associated 
only  with  moral  struggles  and  Church  services,  and 
what  is  narrowly  described  as  Christian  work.  We 
must  let  it  be  known  that  God  can  be  found  at  the 
end  of  every  avenue  along  which  the  human  spirit 
is  impelled  to  seek  an  ideal  end.  The  witness  of 
one  type  of  mind  cannot  be  universally  convincing, 
but  the  cumulative  witness  of  the  saints  and  the 
seers,  the  prophets  and  the  apostles,  the  servants 
of  human  welfare,  the  artists  and  the  truth  seekers, 


54  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

is  overwhelming  testimony  to  the  reality  and  range 
of  man’s  possible  communion  with  God. 

Clutton-Brock  has  argued,  in  T he  Ultimate 
Belief,  that  the  activities  of  the  Spirit  are  not  one, 
nor  two,  but  three.  The  Spirit  is  concerned  for 
goodness,  for  truth  and  for  beauty,  and  there  is  an 
ultimate  good  to  be  found  in  each.  They  are  all 
equally  qualities  of  God,  and  the  spirit  life  is  incom¬ 
plete  unless  it  is  concerned  with  them  all.  Starve 
any  one  of  them  and  the  others  suffer.  And  to-day 
especially,  because  the  spiritual  desire  of  man  to 
enjoy  beauty  and  to  create  beauty  is  discouraged 
and  denied,  the  spirit  of  man  is  stunted  and  en¬ 
feebled.  And  especially  youth,  which  needs  the 
romance  of  the  spirit  to  counterbalance  the  excite¬ 
ment  of  the  romance  of  the  flesh,  is  deprived  of  one 
of  its  essential  safeguards  and  kept  back  from  one 
of  its  essential  goals.  We  shall  return  to  this 
subject  in  a  later  chapter,  but  it  is  important  to 
recognise  at  once  how  many  avenues  of  human 
interest  lead  up  to  man’s  communion  with  God,  and 
to  connect  the  name  of  Jesus  as  much  with  ex¬ 
periences  which  move  the  heart  by  their  beauty  as 
with  those  which  commend  themselves  to  the 
conscience  as  right.  Only  so  can  we  find  in  our 
religion  the  simultaneous  satisfaction  of  all  the 
hungers  of  the  spirit,  the  fitting  climax  of  all 
experiences.  Religious  experience  has  sometimes 
been  thought  of  as  a  separate  department  of 
experience  not  connected  with  the  common  ex¬ 
periences  of  life.  We  ought  rather  to  find  ourselves 
in  communion  with  God  at  the  apex  of  every  form 
of  experience,  in  the  exercise  of  every  faculty  when 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  55 

we  do  our  best  and  keenest,  in  the  pursuit  of  every 
good  purpose  when  we  let  ourselves  go.  At  each 
turn  in  the  road  of  life  we  may  discover  something 
so  good  that  we  can  only  bow  our  heads  in  thankful¬ 
ness  and  reverence  and  say,  It  is  the  Lord.  If  we 
have  known  Jesus  in  His  most  characteristic 
moments — in  the  crowd  and  in  the  temple,  in  the 
Judgment  Hall  and  on  the  Cross — we  shall  find  Him 
beside  us  also  by  hillside  and  lakeside  and  fireside, 
and  our  communion  with  the  highest  will  be  always 
and  altogether  in  Him. 

IV.  The  Fact  of  the  Church 

We  pass  to  consider  the  fourth  great  component 
of  the  evangelical  witness,  the  fact  of  the  Church. 
There  is  offered  to  man  in  the  fellowship  of  the 
disciples  of  Christ  a  social  experience  in  which  it  is 
made  easier  for  him  to  cherish  his  ideals,  to  fight 
off  his  temptations,  to  strengthen  his  affection  for 
his  fellows,  to  form  habits  of  service  and  devotion. 
By  its  ordered  life  of  prayer  and  worship  he  is 
helped  to  certify  himself  of  things  unseen,  and 
to  acquaint  himself  with  God.  The  credit  of  the 
Church  goes  up  and  down  as  the  generations  come 
and  go.  It  is  behindhand  now  in  this,  and  now  in 
that  ;  and  there  are  times,  like  our  own,  when  the 
world  is  out  of  patience  with  its  slow-changing 
traditions  of  thought  and  speech.  And  yet, 
through  all,  there  is  preserved  in  it  a  treasury  of 
knowledge  of  the  ways  in  which  God  speaks  to 
man  and  man  responds  to  God. 

The  Church  is,  in  the  first  place,  the  centre  of 


56  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

man’s  worship,  his  place  of  communion  with  God. 
Incidentally,  it  is  his  place  of  instruction  in  that 
moral  philosophy  of  life  which  his  faith  in  God 
implies  ;  his  school  in  which  to  study  the  funda¬ 
mental  nature  of  God’s  universe,  the  place  he  holds 
in  it  and  the  conduct  befitting  his  divine  sonship. 
This  distinction  between  man’s  direct  experience 
of  God  in  worship  and  his  derived  ideas  of  truth  and 
duty  is  most  important  at  the  present  time.  For  it 
is  necessary  to  emphasise  at  once  the  sureness  and 
reality  of  the  experience  of  God  to  which  men  give 
expression  in  their  public  worship,  and  the  in¬ 
adequacy  and  incompleteness  of  the  language  in 
which  they  express  their  faith.  The  fact  of  spiritual 
energy  resident  in  the  Church,  the  means  of  grace 
which  it  affords,  the  comfort  and  support  of  its 
fellowship,  the  inspiration  and  help  of  its  worship  : 
to  these  things  we  need  ever  to  testify  as  part  of 
the  evangelic  witness.  But  that  reality  of  grace 
and  inspiration  does  not  guarantee  the  rightness  or 
appropriateness  of  all  that  the  Churches  say  or  do. 
Like  every  other  long-lived  institution,  the  Church 
must  always  tend  to  fall  behind  the  times  in  some 
of  its  official  teaching,  and  especially  in  times  of 
change  is  it  hard  for  the  public  presentation  of  the 
truth  to  meet  the  needs  of  young  and  old  at  the  same 
time.  Christian  doctrine  speaks  the  language  of 
philosophy,  and  that  is  a  language  which  is  con¬ 
stantly  changing  and  ceasing  to  carry  its  old 
meanings  ;  and  Christian  morals  deal  with  social 
relationships  which  may  change  their  character  so 
entirely  in  a  generation  as  to  make  maxims  which 
were  once  true  and  vital,  seem  irrelevant  and  trite. 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  57 

It  is,  therefore,  part  of  the  wisdom  of  those  who 
have  to  preach  the  Gospel  to  remember  that  the 
Church  is  fallible  in  its  thinking  and  prone  in  its 
life  and  teaching  to  fall  behind  the  times.  Other¬ 
wise  they  may  raise  expectations  which  they  cannot 
fulfil,  and  put  upon  youth  a  burden  which  it  cannot 
bear.  Thus,  for  example,  in  bringing  new  recruits 
into  the  Christian  fellowship  to-day,  it  is  well  to 
realise  that  many  of  them  may  not  find  their 
spiritual  home  at  all  easily  in  the  societies  and 
services  of  the  Church  as  these  are  at  present 
organised.  It  may  be  necessary  to  devise  new  and 
freer  forms  of  fellowship  to  meet  their  needs.  These 
freer  forms  of  Church  life  are  doubtless  already 
coming  into  existence  in  the  interest  of  those  already 
within  the  Church  ;  but  the  recognition  of  the  needs 
of  those  outside  might  help  to  bring  them  into 
vogue  and  give  them  shape  and  vigour  all  the 
more  speedily. 

One  would  like  to  be  able  to  say  of  the  Church, 
that  in  its  fellowship  every  spiritual  desire  will  be 
satisfied  and  every  spiritual  gift  will  be  enriched  ; 
but  one  must  be  content  to  discriminate  between  the 
spiritual  gifts  which  are  at  present  fostered  in  the 
life  of  the  Church  as  it  is,  and  those  which  only  may 
be.  What  we  may  assert  without  fear  of  exaggera¬ 
tion  is  that  multitudes  of  Christian  people  are 
brought  to  Jesus  through  the  worship  and  fellow¬ 
ship  of  the  Church,  in  such  a  way  that  their  sense  of 
God  is  constantly  refreshed ;  their  thought  of  Him 
constantlv  enriched  ;  their  desire  to  be  like  Him 
constantly  quickened ;  their  insight  into  right 
living  constantly  deepened  ;  and  they  themselves 


58  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

brought  ever  closer  and  closer  into  conformity  with 
His  spirit.  In  spite  of  the  inadequacy  of  the 
specific  teaching  they  receive,  or  of  the  form  in 
which  they  worship,  the  spirit  of  Jesus  is  for  them 
truly  embodied,  and  to  them  truly  communicated. 
And  of  many  of  those  to  whom  the  formal  defects 
are  fully  obvious,  the  same  is  true  ;  the  spirit 
triumphs  over  the  letter  because  it  was  the  spirit 
which  first  gave  the  letter  life.  Christ  is  Himself 
effectively  present  for  them.  The  divine-human 
fellowship  is  experienced  by  them  in  quickening 
power  because  they  do  indeed  share  God’s  purpose 
and  not  merely  profess  His  name  ;  it  is  the  more 
potent  exactly  in  proportion  as  they  share  imagina¬ 
tively  and  explicitly,  as  well  as  silently  and 
symbolically,  in  the  furtherance  of  His  purpose,  and 
learn  to  know  it  in  all  its  breadth  and  range. 

So  much  we  can  emphatically  claim  on  behalf  of 
the  fellowship  of  the  Christian  Church  ;  but  at  the 
same  time  we  are  bound  to  acknowledge  that  in 
some  respects  the  Churches  tend  to  quench  the 
Spirit  of  Christ  in  those  whom  they  influence, 
because  they  fail  to  identify  themselves  fully  and 
clearly  with  His  social  programme.  And  so  it 
comes  to  pass  that  there  is  a  spirit  in  the  world 
to-day,  outside  the  Churches,  in  some  ways  more 
responsive  to  the  call  of  Christ  than  the  spirit 
embodied  in  our  present  Christian  institutions.  It 
is  a  spirit  quickened  indeed  by  influences  which 
Christ  has  wielded  both  within  and  without  the 
Church,  expressing  itself  here  and  there  in  other 
movements  while  as  yet  it  is  not  fully  embodied  in 
the  organised  life  of  the  Church.  Until  it  finds  its 


YESTERDAY,  TO-DAY,  AND  FOR  EVER  59 

adequate  expression  within  the  Church,  the  full 
power  of  the  witness  of  the  Christian  fellowship 
cannot  be  felt,  because  the  characteristic  longing  of 
this  generation  for  spiritual  fellowship  will  remain 
unsatisfied.  In  the  Church,  in  the  past,  our  fathers 
in  different  ages  strove  to  relate  the  Person  of 
Christ  to  their  conceptions  of  Justice  and  Govern¬ 
ment  and  Providence  and  to  their  hope  of  the 
hereafter,  because  that  wa3  the  direction  in  which 
their  spirits  craved  for  a  truer  understanding  of  life  ; 
they  succeeded,  and  were  satisfied.  So  also  in  its 
turn  the  present  generation  longs  to  relate  the 
Person  of  Christ  to  its  conceptions  of  human 
personality  and  progress,  to  discover  in  Him  the 
power  and  the  way  to  transform  the  social  life  of 
the  world,  and  to  read  the  whole  movement  of 
history  in  the  light  He  has  shed  on  life’s  ideals  and 
purposes.  Youth  especially  is  moved  by  this 
aspiration,  and  needs  help  in  Christian  fellowship 
in  order  to  relate  it  to  the  Person  of  Christ.  To 
those  who  believe  in  the  divine  calling  of  the 
Church,  and  perceive  this,  it  is  simply  inevitable 
that  the  Churches  will  presently  awaken  to  this 
need  and  meet  it ;  but  we  are  bound  at  the  same 
time  to  recognise  that  whilst  their  failure  to  do  so 
continues,  it  must  greatly  diminish  the  power  of 
their  appeal. 

This,  however,  raises  problems  which  would 
take  us  beyond  the  scope  of  the  present  chapter, 
and  are  best  left  alone  till  a  later  point  in  the  book. 
It  will  be  well,  before  we  look  any  further  at  these 
questions  of  Church  organisation,  that  we  should 
try  to  envisage  the  Christian  conception  of  life, 


60  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

endeavouring  to  see  our  ordinary  social  interests 
and  activities  in  the  light  which  Jesus  throws  upon 
them.  It  is  probable  that  the  point  of  contact 
between  the  Gospel  and  many  modern  minds  will 
be  the  view  of  life  for  which  the  Gospel  stands.  Such 
questions  as  those  of  the  relation  of  business 
standards  to  Christian  standards,  and  of  the  place 
and  value  of  play  in  the  world  must  be  answered 
as  Jesus  would  be  likely  to  answer  them  before  the 
upshot  of  the  invitation  to  be  a  Christian  can  be 
fairly  understood.  Silence  regarding  them  can 
but  endorse  the  widespread,  though  quite  errone¬ 
ous,  impression  that  Christianity  must  be  kept 
as  far  as  possible  from  modern  business,  and  the 
Christian  kept  equally  far  from  many  of  the  amuse¬ 
ments  he  would  otherwise  most  naturally  choose. 
To  these  matters  we  now  therefore  turn. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE  CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK 

In  this  and  the  next  chapter  we  shall  attempt  to 
sketch  in  bare  outline  a  Christian  conception  of  Life, 
the  object  being  to  bring  the  fundamental  ideas  of 
Christianity  into  touch  with  the  common  problems 
and  interests  of  work-a-day  folk.  If  we  deal  with 
life  under  the  two  comprehensive  headings  of  work 
and  leisure,  we  shall  not  need  to  leave  out  much 
that  matters  ;  though  the  treatment  can  only  be 
exceedingly  summary  in  the  space  available.  All 
that  is  possible  is  a  mention  of  some  outstanding 
points  in  the  common  conception  of  life  that 
raise  a  barrier  to  the  understanding  of  the  Christian 
conception,  and  thus  prevent  the  acceptance  of 
the  Gospel.  For  example,  if  it  be  thought  that 
business  life  is  bound  to  be  lived  on  a  lower  plane 
than  that  required  by  the  teaching  of  Jesus,  the 
door  of  many  minds  is  shut  at  once  against  Christi¬ 
anity.  Or,  again,  if  play  be  thought  of  as  essentially 
a  frivolous  matter  from  the  spiritual  standpoint, 
youth  is  set  at  once  in  opposition  to  the  things  of 
the  spirit.  We  shall  expound  the  Christian  con¬ 
ception  of  life  no  more  than  is  necessary  to  counter 
views  like  these  which  inhibit  the  understanding 
and  acceptance  of  the  Gospel  at  the  outset  :  not 
attempting  a  treatment  full  enough  to  supply  working 

61 


62  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

guidance  for  Christian  conduct  in  special  cases. 
We  want  a  view  of  work  and  play  which  satisfies 
the  instincts  of  the  Christian  as  right  and  good, 
whilst  at  the  same  time  it  satisfies  the  instincts  of 
the  practical  man  as  sound  and  practical. 

Of  the  two  subjects,  work  and  leisure,  leisure 
might  seem  to  be  the  more  suitable  to  begin  with, 
as  being  the  more  interesting  of  the  two  for  the 
majority,  and,  therefore,  the  best  point  of  contact 
for  the  discussion  of  life’s  values  ;  but  the  uses  of 
leisure  are  so  bound  up  with  the  results  of  work 
that  it  will  be  better  to  consider  first  the  Christian 
conception  of  work. 

Let  us  begin  by  asserting  roundly  that  Christ 
would  have  the  business  life  of  every  man  made  as 
truly  God’s  business  as  was  His  own,  when  He  said, 
“  Wist  ye  not  that  I  must  be  about  My  Father’s 
business  ?  ”  In  all  his  working  life,  a  clerk  or 
artisan  is  to  seek  first  the  Kingdom  of  God,  just  as 
surely  and  truly  as  is  a  missionary  or  hospital 
nurse.  The  line  is  still  drawn  firmly  between  the 
sacred  and  the  secular  in  popular  thought,  in  spite 
of  all  the  rhetoric  of  Christian  preachers — and  it 
will  continue  to  be  so  drawn  until  it  is  erased  from 
the  chart  of  life  just  at  the  point  where  it  is  drawn 
between  business  and  religion.  To  bring  this  to 
pass  we  must  take  our  stand  firmly  on  the  ground 
that  those  who  are  ministering  truly  to  the  welfare 
of  human  life  on  its  material  side  are  doing  work 
which  is  as  essential  to  the  Kingdom  of  God  upon 
earth  as  that  of  those  who  are  ministering  directly 
to  men’s  minds  and  spirits.  This  view  is  based 
upon  the  manifest  concern  of  Jesus  Himself  for  the 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  63 

welfare  of  the  material  life,  His  ministry  to  the 
needs  of  the  human  body,  His  conjunction  of 
physical  and  spiritual  well-being  in  His  own  action. 
From  this  alone  we  can  be  confident  that  all  work 
which  is  truly  adding  to  the  fulness  and  wholesome¬ 
ness  of  human  life  on  its  physical  side  is  work  for 
the  Kingdom,  having  its  own  intrinsic  value  on 
the  spiritual  plane. 

We  are  thus  led  on  to  ground  where  innumerable 
questions  may  arise  as  to  the  particular  value  of 
this  or  that  method  or  product  of  business  life  to  the 
real  welfare  of  the  world — material  and  spiritual. 
We  can  attempt  no  more  than  to  lay  down  broad 
principles  without  application  except  in  very  few 
points  by  way  of  illustration.  What  we  are  looking 
for  is  a  set  of  standards  which  will  judge  whether  a 
given  line  of  business  action  is  right  and  good,  at 
once  from  a  practical  and  from  a  religious  stand¬ 
point.  We  are  trying  to  judge  all  work  by  the 
standard  of  its  intrinsic  worth  to  human  life, — not 
separating  the  physical  from  the  spiritual, — rein¬ 
forcing  our  common  practical  standards  by  the 
absolute  standards  of  religion.  Doing  so  we  shall 
find  at  least  the  following  five  points  of  general 
importance,  the  first  two  relating  to  the  work  in 
itself  and  the  rest  concerning  the  relations  between 
the  persons  involved  in  the  work. 

I.  The  Standards  of  Good  Work 

In  the  first  place,  the  work  of  a  Christian  must 
have  real  social  usefulness ,  directly  or  indirectly,  and 
he  must  be  persuaded  that  it  has,  and  find  inspiration 


64  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

for  energetic  and  efficient  effort  in  so  thinking. 
“  What  are  you  doing  ?  ”  said  a  visitor  to  a  man 
working  in  a  stoneyard  in  New  York.  “  Earning 
five  dollars  a  day,”  was  the  reply.  “  What  are 
you  doing  ?  ”  said  the  visitor  to  the  next  man  in 
the  stoneyard.  “  Making  these  stones  square,” 
wTas  the  reply.  “  What  are  you  doing  ?  ”  said  the 
visitor  to  the  third  man.  “  Helping  to  build  a 
cathedral,”  said  he.  Each  man  of  the  three  tvas 
doing  all  these  things,  but  different  things  were 
uppermost  in  their  minds.  In  a  Christian  con¬ 
ception  of  work  the  prominent  thing  will  be  the 
quality  of  the  service  rendered,  the  value  that  some 
one  shall  find  in  the  thing  that  is  being  done. 

Such  an  idea  of  service  is  easier  in  some  trades 
than  in  others.  Those  who  grow  food,  make 
clothes,  build  houses,  should  easily  take  hold  of  it. 
In  many  cases  processes  are  so  divided  that  some 
imagination  is  needed  to  realise  the  service  rendered. 
Yet  a  man  who  only  tacks  on  the  sole  of  a  boot 
must  realise  that  it  is  to  the  making  of  boots  he  is 
contributing,  and  there  can  be  few  processes  in 
which  it  would  not  be  possible  to  discover  the  value 
of  the  thing  made.  Workers  on  railways  and 
telegraph  systems  may  and  do  feel  the  essential 
value  of  their  work.  Rough  work  like  that  of 
mining  and  scavenging  inspires  the  same  sense  of 
public  service  in  some  people.  But  makers  of  beer 
and  dispensers  of  spirits  may  have  to  ask  themselves 
whether  the  good  or  the  evil  predominates  in  the 
use  to  which  they  minister.  Brokers  who  encourage 
their  clients  to  trade  in  “  margins,”  organisers  of 
public  gambles  and  lotteries,  and  all  procurers  for 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  65 

the  baser  passions  of  men  will  hardly  attempt  to 
justify  their  occupations  by  the  criterion  of  public 
usefulness. 

There  are,  of  course,  many  things  which  a  worker 
may  be  asked  to  do  which  directly  diminish  the 
value  of  his  services  to  the  public.  It  helps  no  one 
to  saturate  skins  with  water  before  they  are  weighed 
for  sale.  It  is  humiliating  to  be  engaged  in  adulter¬ 
ating  useful  goods  or  crying  up  the  value  of  poor 
ones.  The  tricks  of  trade  wfill  raise  in  manv  a 
man’s  mind  difficult  questions  as  to  where  he  should 
draw  the  line  or  how  far  his  responsibility  runs. 
This  is  not  the  place  to  propound  typical  cases  for 
conscientious  decision.  But  things  wrill  never  be 
rightly  decided  unless  there  is  first  in  each  man’s 
mind  a  positive  ideal  of  service,  so  that  he  will  not 
tolerate  giving  his  life  to  work  wffiich  is  not,  on  the 
whole,  of  real  and  substantial  public  benefit. 

In  the  second  place,  the  work  of  a  Christian  man 
should  he  a  medium  for  his  true  self-expression  and  a 
source  of  joy  to  him.  He  must  put  into  his  work  as 
much  of  himself  as  the  nature  of  his  work  allows, 
and  in  doing  so  he  will  find  joy  in  it.  If  there  is 
in  it  any  opening  whatever  for  the  exercise  of  in¬ 
telligence,  artistry,  distinction  of  touch  or  creative 
originality  of  any  kind,  he  must  take  advantage  ot 
it.  His  nature  being  spiritual,  he  ought  to  be 
discontented  to  do  anvthing  that  does  not  admit 
some  real  expression  of  his  intelligence  and  his 
goodwill.  At  the  least  he  can  work  with  concentra¬ 
tion,  zest,  and  energy  ;  and  though  the  routine  and 
repetition  character  of  much  modern  industry  makes 
any  real  originality  difficult,  yet  there  is  more  room 

F 


66  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

for  this  than  many  suppose,  and  it  is  essential  to 
seize  all  the  opportunities  there  are.  Only  by  doing 
so  can  the  work  of  the  world  be  lifted  to  a  spiritual 
plane.  When  work  is  done  without  keenness, 
character  suffers.  It  is  deteriorating  to  slack  ;  for 
it  robs  the  slacker  both  of  his  own  personal  vigour, 
and  of  his  sense  of  doing  his  best  for  his  fellows. 
If  (as  is  alleged)  the  conditions  of  modern  industry 
make  it  unsportsmanlike  for  some  of  the  best 
workers  to  work  as  fast  as  they  easily  can,  lest  they 
set  a  pace  which  their  fellows  cannot  follow,  the 
permanent  remedy  for  it  cannot  be  mere  slacking, 
for  that  redaces  both  the  worker’s  vitality  and  the 
world’s  material  and  moral  wealth. 

There  are,  of  course,  a  host  of  trivial  and 
monotonous  occupations  in  industry  and  business 
into  which  it  is  not  easy  to  put  a  great  deal  of 
personality.  But  it  may  yet  be  possible  to  put  a 
little.  We  must  not  overlook  the  possibility  of 
putting  skill  and  care  and  spiritual  feeling  into  the 
doing  of  the  simplest  acts.  There  is  opportunity 
enough  for  a  real  expression  of  character  in  the 
handwriting  in  which  ledgers  are  kept,  in  the  finish 
with  which  a  nail  is  driven  home,  in  the  cleaning 
and  tidying  of  a  home.  Few  people  can  have 
occupations  which  call  out  their  capacities  to  the 
full,  or  duties  which  do  not  irk  and  cramp  them  at 
some  points.  Few,  on  the  other  hand,  can  have 
occupations  to  which  they  cannot  bring  some 
standard  and  some  finish  beyond  what  is  demanded 
in  their  bond,  and  it  is  this  that  makes  their  work 
an  expression  of  the  spirit  and  an  offering  to  the 
glory  of  God. 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  67 

Along  such  lines  it  becomes  possible  to  find  in 
work  of  the  most  prosaic  kind  a  source  of  real  joy. 
Many  have  testified  to  the  entire  change  which  has 
come  over  them  when  they  have  found  a  new 
mental  adjustment  to  their  work,  affecting  their 
attitude  of  spirit  toward  it.  Without  any  change 
in  the  work,  some  change  in  themselves  has  turned 
it  from  a  weariness  of  the  flesh  to  a  delightful  game  ; 
and  even  when  the  work  remains  in  itself  uncon¬ 
genial,  it  may  be  possible  to  find  in  it  an  opportunity 
to  perfect  some  gift  of  patience  or  perseverance 
or  ingenuity  which  one  wishes  to  acquire  and  can 
learn  to  regard  as  worth  the  pain  and  trouble 
of  the  process  by  which  it  is  gained.  Certain 
it  is  that  a  very  great  deal  of  the  discomfort  and 
distress  which  many  now  feel  in  their  work  would 
pass  away  if  they  could  turn  themselves  about  and 
take  a  different  view  of  it.  Certain  also  is  it  that 
many  have  found  in  their  religion  a  means  of  so 
turning  themselves  about  as  to  find  pleasure  in 
drudgery  of  every  kind.* 

It  is  indeed  an  essential  quality  of  the  Christian 
life  that  it  should  find  pleasure  in  all  that  it  does. 
The  creative  joy  that  is  felt  by  all  true  craftsmen 
in  work  well  done,  whether  the  work  be  manual  or 
mental,  is  easy  enough  to  understand.  In  it  a  man 
positively  shares  the  joy  of  God  the  Creator  :  he 
is  indeed  continuing  the  Creator’s  work  and  his  joy 
is  the  sign  and  seal  of  it.  There  is  also  an  imported 
joy  when  uncongenial  tasks  are  done  for  some  one 
else’s  sake — for  the  service  of  the  city  or  the  mainte¬ 
nance  of  “  weans  and  wife.”  If  there  is  not  a  way 

*  Cf.  the  well-known  tract  Blessed  be  Drudgery . 


68  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

of  looking  at  a  job  that  enables  one  to  throw 
oneself  into  it  with  some  satisfying  purpose,  then 
one  should,  if  a  Christian,  take  steps  to  get  out  of  it. 
For  joy  is  the  mark  of  the  Christian  life.  Clear 
witness  to  the  possibility  of  enjoying  humdrum 
routine  is  a  thing  which  the  world  needs  greatly, 
and  some  give  it  with  good  effect.  There  are  many 
who  would  be  a  long  step  nearer  to  believing  in 
Christianity  if  they  could  only  have  as  their  working 
companions  people  who  had  learned  to  enjoy  their 
work.  Only  by  the  contagion  of  such  examples 
will  the  world  be  won  for  Christianity  and  qualified 
to  depend  less  upon  the  present  hateful  spur  of 
mere  competition  to  call  forth  its  labour.  And  in 
proportion  as  this  happens,  the  conditions  of  work 
will  themselves  be  changed  and  made  more  favour¬ 
able  to  the  expression  of  creative  joy. 

II.  The  Personal  Relations  Work  brings 

Turning  now  from  the  wTork  itself  to  the  relations 
in  wdiich  it  places  us  to  other  people,  we  have  to 
notice,  firstly,  the  opportunity  work  affords  for 
personal  contact  with  individuals.  The  Christian 
principle  here  is  plain  and  well  understood.  To  all 
our  fellow-workers  we  are  bound  as  Christians  to  be 
brotherly.  We  are  bound  to  be  interested  in  them, 
to  cultivate  their  society,  to  enter  into  their  interests, 
to  protect  them  if  they  need  protection,  socially  or 
morally.  We  must  share  with  them  anything  we 
possess  and  value  that  can  be  shared,  and  especially 
should  we  share  with  them  an  attitude  to  our  work 
which  is  invigorating,  energising,  inspiring,  and 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  69 

conducive  to  the  religious  life.  In  a  word,  we  have 
to  be  good  fellows  to  our  fellow  workers,  and  that 
in  spite  of  all  the  difficulties  which  incompati¬ 
bilities  of  temperament  and  ideal  will  produce.  To 
the  non-religious  this  will  not  seem  possible  unless 
they  are  temperamentally  sociable  ;  but  the  Gospel 
offers  a  new  nature  to  those  who  accept  it,  a  nature 
full  of  the  spirit  and  temper  of  goodwill,  together 
with  a  constantly  renewed  supply  of  spiritual 
energy  to  restore  again  the  frayed  edges  of  good 
temper  when  it  has  been  ragged  and  torn.  Con¬ 
stancy  and  cheerfulness  are  recognised  to  be  the 
staple  ingredients  of  good  fellowship  without  which 
it  can  hardly  maintain  its  name  and  reputation. 

In  some  working  environments,  it  is  something 
to  be  able  to  bear  the  shocks  and  buffets  of  social 
intercourse  without  loss  of  temper.  But  an  active 
goodwill  would  go  further  than  that  and  work 
constructively  to  build  up  a  happier  and  more 
healthy  social  life.  For  this  end  testimony  is  borne 
to  the  value  of  cultivating  social  fellowship  with 
one?s  work-fellows  in  leisure  hours  :  it  humanises 
working  relationships,  and  engenders  readier  sym¬ 
pathies.  Another  duty  of  goodwill  is  the  protec¬ 
tion,  wherever  opportunities  offer,  of  those  who 
are  morally  weak  against  those  who  are  morally 
corrupting,  a  duty  which  may  arise  in  numberless 
instances  in  office  and  factory  life,  in  such  matters 
as  swreepstakes,  enforced  drinking,  and  undesirable 
conversation. 

It  belongs  also  to  the  duty  of  Christian  goodwill 
to  take  a  hand  in  trade-union  activities,  seeing  that 
these  are  the  accepted  constitutional  means  of 


70  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

working  for  better  conditions  in  industry,  and  one’s 
duty  to  make  one’s  neighbour’s  life  as  satisfying  as 
possible  cannot  be  fulfilled  if  this  means  of  influence 
is  neglected.  Each  of  us  is  called  to  try  to  improve 
the  conditions  under  which  our  fellows  work,  if 
they  are  ill-considered  or  unsatisfactory ;  the 
quality  of  the  work  they  are  expected  to  do,  if  it  is 
degrading  ;  the  pay  they  receive,  if  it  is  unjust. 
We  are  our  brother’s  keepers  to  see  that  they  are 
not  put  under  too  great  a  strain,  either  physical, 
mental,  or  moral ;  to  guard  the  weak  and  un¬ 
developed  against  too  great  fatigue  or  monotony 
in  their  work,  or  against  work  so  mechanical  that  it 
contains  no  educative  element,  or  so  shoddy  and 
second-rate  in  type  that  it  is  positively  demoral¬ 
izing  ;  against  a  social  environment  which  is 
morally  corroding.  This  responsibility  need  not 
turn  a  Christian  into  a  busybody  or  a  prig,  though 
sometimes  it  has  done  so.  We  are  not,  in  the  first 
instance,  called  to  press  our  moral  and  religious 
principles  upon  the  attention  of  other  people, 
though  there  may  be  times  when  it  would  be  weak 
and  cowardly  not  to  express  them.  Undoubtedly, 
however,  the  first  duty  is  to  function  happily  in  the 
social  life  of  one’s  work-fellows. 

In  the  next  place,  through  our  work,  we  are  all 
personally  related,  not  only  with  our  immediate 
work-fellows,  but  with  a  vast  unknown  public  who 
benefit,  or  it  may  be  suffer,  from  our  labour.  Jo 
this  wider  public  also  we  are  bound  as  Christians 
always  to  behave  as  good  neighbours .  We  have  a 
duty  to  them  which  is  not  fulfilled  by  simple  sub¬ 
servience  to  the  law  of  the  market.  We  nave  to 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  71 

manifest  our  intelligent  control  of  the  blind 
machinery  of  supply  and  demand,  by  a  direct 
exercise  of  goodwill  in  deciding  how  far  we  are 
willing  to  benefit  individually,  or  as  a  trade  group, 
by  the  ups  and  downs  of  commercial  fortune.  In 
this  both  those  who  hold  positions  of  control  in 
industry  and  commerce,  and  those  who  occupy 
subordinate  posts,  will  no  doubt  be  confronted  with 
many  challenging  conditions.  For  instance,  one 
realises  that  there  are  endless  complexities  in  the 
finance  of  big  businesses  which  make  all  moral 
principles  difficult  to  apply.  But  this  at  least  can 
be  said  with  confidence,  that  the  problem  of  the 
right  distribution  of  wealth  will  not  be  solved  till 
Christian  men  and  women  will  always  regard  them¬ 
selves  as  being  in  friendly  partnership  with  the 
public,  from  whom  they  will  be  no  more  desirous 
of  taking  the  lion’s  share  of  the  benefit  of  their 
work  than  they  would  of  making  a  corner  in  fruit 
at  a  banquet.  This  refusal  to  regard  any  persons 
whose  lives  we  touch  indirectly  as  other  than 
friends  is  essential  to  our  acquiring  the  spirit  which 
will  inspire  the  solution  of  our  own  part  of  the 
social  problem.  The  principle  of  service  wall  also 
put  a  limit  upon  the  amount  that  any  man  with 
a  social  conscience  will  wish  to  take  as  the  reward 
for  his  own  work.  He  wall  look  sharply  at  high 
profits,  and  values  due  to  the  adventitious  advan¬ 
tages  of  monopoly.  He  will  not  wish  to  create  a 
situation  in  which  his  profit  is  secured  by  the  ruin 
of  other  men,  and  will  do  much  to  avoid  such 
contingencies. 

And,  lastly,  we  are  bound  as  Christians  to  work 


72  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

towards  the  transformation  of  our  present  industrial 
processes  and  business  arrangements .  We  want  to 
create  a  more  Christian  system,  so  conducted  that 
the  co-operation  of  man  with  man  wffiich  it  entails 
is  friendly  and  congenial  and  helpful  to  all  con¬ 
cerned.  We  want  methods  of  work  and  organisa¬ 
tion  that  are  better  calculated  to  exercise  and 
develop  the  many-sided  personalities  which  they 
employ,  more  stimulating  to  the  joy  of  work  and 
to  the  friendliness  of  fellow  workers,  and  more 
successful  in  distributing  the  wealth  of  the  world 
widely  to  all  who  can  benefit  by  it.  This  is  the  last 
and  hardest  part  of  the  task  of  fellowship  in  the 
world  of  work. 

We  are  not  forgetting  the  difficulties  of  realising 
this  ideal.  Beyond  the  basal  difficulty  of  wresting 
all  we  want  from  nature,  there  is  the  difficulty  of 
overcoming  the  conflict  of  interests  which  arise 
between  man  and  man.  These  difficulties  as  we 
know  have  given  rise  to  traditional  inequalities, 
traditional  injustices,  traditional  feuds  between 
rival  groups  in  the  community.  There  are  all  kinds 
of  sources  of  misunderstanding  and  conflict  both  in 
the  control  of  industry  and  the  distribution  of  its 
gains.  The  organisation  of  industry  and  commerce 
cannot  be  exactly  what  it  would  be  if  every  one 
were  industrious  and  every  one  as  eager  for  the 
rights  of  others  as  for  his  own.  Industry  would  not 
be  inspired,  it  would  only  be  exploded,  if  produc¬ 
tivity  and  discipline  were  sacrificed  to  a  sentimental 
and  doctrinaire  view  of  the  way  in  which  we  should 
treat  one  another.  An  empioyer  who  has  to  con¬ 
sider  his  markets  has  only  to  a  very  small  extent 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  73 

a  free  hand  in  fixing  the  conditions  which  he  offers 
to  his  employees,  and  they  in  their  turn  must  be 
governed  in  their  dealings  with  him,  not  only  by 
the  personal  goodwill  they  may  feel  towards  him, 
but  by  the  loyalties  they  owe  to  their  fellow  workers 
in  their  own  and  other  trades.  We  should  not  for 
one  moment  minimise  the  difficulties  of  the  position. 
Few  people  of  goodwill  will  be  able  to  realise  any¬ 
thing  like  their  ideal  of  fellowship  in  their  dealings 
with  one  another  in  the  business  world,  or  in  the 
professional  world. 

And  yet  the  necessary  condition  of  Jovalty  to  a 
Christian  ideal  of  life  is  a  wholehearted  attempt  to 
put  all  business  relations  on  to  a  footing  of  real 
goodwill,  of  mutual  understanding,  of  friendly 
give  and  take, — a  sharing  in  the  benefits  and 
responsibilities  of  the  common  enterprise,  approxi¬ 
mating  more  and  more  toward  equality  as  better 
and  better  means  are  found  for  developing  the 
capacities  of  all  involved.  Seek  ye  first  the 
Kingdom  of  God  means  in  commerce  and  industry, 
that  fellowship  is  placed  in  the  forefront  of  a  man’s 
practical  business  aims.  And  so  far  as  a  man  is 
responsive  to  this  ideal,  he  becomes  a  co-worker 
with  God  and  a  vehicle  of  the  Spirit  in  the  wrorld 
process  by  which  God  is  evolving  a  social  common¬ 
wealth  upon  the  earth.  He  will  have  “  experience  ” 
of  God  in  the  progressive  discovery  of  himself  as 
a  means  by  which  the  Spirit  of  God  brings  increasing 
goodness  into  the  working  world.  The  higher  a 
man  estimates  the  openness  of  his  own  personality 
to  the  influence  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  the  more  will 
he  be  impelled  to  encourage  and  expect  his  fellows 


74  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

to  respond  to  higher  motives  and  appeals  to  their 
better  qualities.  He  will  believe  so  deeply  in  the 
fundamental  qualities  of  human  nature,  that  he 
will  reckon  it  a  shame  not  to  give  men  and  women 
everywhere  a  chance  to  develop  from  being  merely 
machines,  kept  at  work  by  fear  of  starving,  into  free 
persons  working  from  interest  in  their  work  and  the 
will  to  do  their  best  with  the  rest.  He  will  keep 
before  him  always  the  practical  hope  that  both  the 
methods  and  the  motives  of  the  working  world  can 
be  made  more  worthy  of  human  personality  and 
of  God’s  offer  to  inspire  men  to  co-operate  happily. 
He  will  be  prepared  to  work  hard  for  that  hope 
and  risk  a  great  deal  at  times  to  give  effect  to  it, 
trusting  a  man  sometimes  for  more  than  he  has  yet 
proved  himself  worth,  continuing  to  do  good  work 
though  some  one  else  exploits  it,  sacrificing  profits 
rather  than  let  honourable  principles  go  by  the 
board.  And  in  all  this  he  will  not  be  governed  by 
the  conventional  standards  of  the  time,  or  worried 
by  the  letter  of  even  the  Christian  law,  but  will  let 
the  Spirit  of  Christ  lead  him  where  it  will. 

III.  The  Crux  of  the  Business 

And  here  we  face  an  almost  overwhelming 
difficulty.  It  is  the  fact  that  many  find  themselves 
engaged  in  work  which  seems  intrinsically  so  futile, 
so  repressive,  so  monotonous,  so  bound  up  with 
malpractice,  so  unfriendly  toward  competitors,  or 
so  embittered  by  the  sense  of  injustice  or  exploita¬ 
tion  suffered  by  themselves,  that  it  is  difficult  for 
them  to  regard  all  this  idealism  as  anything  but 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  75 

airy  nonsense.  We  are  brought  here  to  a  problem 
which  can  only  be  resolved  by  Christ.  We  are 
up  against  the  inherent  evil  of  this  present  life,  and 
the  problem  of  the  vexation  and  pain  and  defeat 
which  are  an  inevitable  part  of  it,  and  we  have  to 
seek  the  attitude  of  Jesus  to  all  this  evil  and  learn 
to  adopt  it.  Attempting  to  do  so  we  find  these  two 
principles  which  go  down  to  the  very  heart  of  Christi¬ 
anity,  and  which  apply  directly  to  our  problem. 

First  of  all,  we  have  to  recognise,  as  Jesus 
recognised,  that  for  the  time  being  at  least,  evil 
and  suffering  are  here,  and  we  have  got  to  accept 
them  and  bear  them  whilst  at  the  same  time  we 
lay  hold  of  other  elements  in  our  experience  wdiich 
justify  us  in  believing  that  the  supreme  and  ultimate 
fact  of  life  is  God’s  love  and  Fatherhood.  The 
great  life,  and  in  the  end,  the  happy  life,  is  the  life 
which  takes  up  its  share,  and  more  than  its  share, 
of  this  pain  and  sorrow,  refusing  to  be  embittered 
by  it.  This  attitude  to  life  is  peculiarly  that  of 
Christ,  and  it  is  only  from  Him  that  we  can 
acquire  it. 

On  this  view,  work,  even  hard  monotonous  and 
wearing  work,  with  its  conditions  of  fixity  and 
inexorable  necessity,  is  not  due  entirely  to  the 
selfishness  of  employers  and  possessors,  or  to  the 
particular  cussedness  of  the  present  economic  and 
industrial  system  under  which  we  work.  The  main 
difficulty  is  at  any  rate  partly  due  to  the  hard  facts 
of  nature.  When  all  is  done  that  can  be  done  to 
prevent  the  oppression  and  exploitation  of  the 
weak,  there  will  still  be  much  that  is  wearing  and 
hard  and  monotonous  that  cannot  be  eliminated 


7 6  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

from  life.  There  will  still  be  much  that  must  be 
borne.  And  apparently  this  is  part  of  God’s 
ordering.  Nature  is  beautiful  enough  and  generous 
enough,  but  it  has  elements  of  intractability  and 
ugliness  that  test  our  wills  and  our  ideals  to  the 
uttermost.  It  may  be  that  they  are  there  in  order 
that  the  struggle  with  them  shall  make  man  finer 
and  nobler.  At  any  rate,  they  are  there,  and  it 
would  seem  that  Jesus  quietly  accepted  them  as 
part  of  the  unalterable  factors  of  experience  in 
which  we  must  simply  acquiesce.  His  own  acqui¬ 
escence  in  these  stern  conditions  of  life  led  to  no 
kind  of  fatalism  nor  any  steeling  of  the  heart 
toward  sufferers,  as  we  well  know.  But  it  remains 
a  fact  that  Jesus,  who  knew  so  much  of  the  trouble 
of  the  world  and  did  so  much  to  alleviate  its  suffer¬ 
ing,  never  seemed  oppressed  by  its  existence. 

We  have  an  inkling  here  of  the  Christian’s 
proper  attitude  to  those  hard  facts  of  experience 
which  will  remain  while  human  skill  and  goodwill 
are  doing  their  best  for  the  amelioration  of  the 
conditions  of  working  life.  Are  we  as  Christians  to 
resent  these  permanent  irreducible  hard  conditions, 
or  such  of  them  as  we  cannot  in  our  own  time 
change  ?  Or  shall  we  accept  them  as,  here  and  now, 
if  not  ultimately  and  ideally,  God’s  goodwill,  in 
which  we  may  find  our  chance  of  peace  and  salva¬ 
tion  ?  Is  not  this  side  of  things  included  in  Jesus’ 
idea  of  the  daily  cross,  which  seems  so  integral  a 
thing  in  His  experience  and  in  the  experience  He 
foretold  for  His  disciples  ?  The  thought  can  be 
misrepresented,  and  misunderstood,  but  we  ignore 
what  is  true  in  it  at  our  peril.  Truth  is  truth,  and 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  77 

Jesus  surely  saw  things  in  truer  proportion  than  we 
in  our  impatience  are  likely  to  do.  Reconciliation 
with  the  world,  as  God’s  training-ground  for  us, 
He  seems  to  regard  as  a  vital  part  of  our  reconcilia¬ 
tion  to  God.  As  such  it  is  tremendously  important, 
both  for  our  peace  of  mind  and  for  our  effectiveness. 

And,  secondly,  when  this  reconciliation  with  our 
experience  is  effected  on  Jesus’  lines,  the  result  is  not, 
as  has  been  said,  a  stoical  indifference  to  evil  or 
passive  sufferance  of  it.  If  we  take  the  attitude 
of  Jesus,  we  do  not  find  ourselves  inclined,  as  it 
were,  to  take  evil  lying  down.  On  the  contrary, 
we  find  ourselves  in  a  position  of  new  power  over 
our  circumstances.  Having  escaped  from  the 
captivity  of  our  spirits,  we  often  (though  not  always) 
discover  that  we  can  escape  also  from  the  captivity 
to  circumstances  which  gave  rise  to  our  spiritual 
bondage.  It  is  probably  required  of  many  people 
to-day  that,  watching  patiently  for  opportunities, 
and  then  venturing  largely  on  their  faith  in  God, 
they  should  refuse  to  acquiesce  in  their  circum¬ 
stances.  They  should  have  faith  either  to  change 
the  conditions  of  their  work,  or  to  change  their  work 
itself.  Few  people  nowadays  have  a  really  effective 
choice  of  occupation  in  their  youth,  though  possibly 
there  should  be  many  more  who  seriously  question  in 
adult  life  whether  or  not  they  should  go  on  with  it. 

It  is  not  a  mere  counsel  of  perfection  to  say  that 
unless  we  can  serve  God’s  purposes  in  our  jobs  we 
should  get  out  of  them.  In  many  situations  we 
may  not  be  able  to  work  as  well  and  serviceably  as 
we  might  do  if  we  could  re-make  the  world  of  industry 
to-morrow,  and  yet  find  opportunities  which  it 


78  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

would  be  foolish  or  cowardly  to  abandon.  We  may 
know,  if  we  will,  whether  or  not  we  can  continue  in 
such  situations  with  the  sense  of  God’s  personal 
commission  to  us  to  do  so.  And  if  we  decide  that 
we  ought  to  continue  where  we  are,  though  many 
things  in  our  business  life  may  still  seem  incongruous 
with  the  Spirit  of  Christ  we  may  proceed  with 
patience  to  eliminate  them,  and  even  make  tem¬ 
porary  concessions  to  circumstances  without  com- 

5romising  our  inmost  souls.  If  this  be  compromise, 
esus  compromised  with  Roman  Imperialism  and 
the  institution  of  slavery,  in  that  He  was  content 
to  work  within  the  system  of  life  which  they 
established  without  directly  attacking  them,  doing 
so  surely  because  there  were  other  knots  in  the 
social  and  moral  life  of  the  world  which  it  was  more 
urgent  that  He  should  cut  or  disentangle.  But  if 
this  be  not  compromise,  it  leaves  our  spiritual 
energies  unimpaired  and  our  hearts  whole  to  work 
by  collective  action,  along  both  voluntary  and 
political  lines,  to  eliminate  from  industry  evils 
which  our  isolated  individual  effort  cannot  touch. 
Thereby  we  may  have  the  spiritual  satisfaction  of 
knowing  that  though  our  lives  are  given  to  work 
which  is  not  ideal  in  all  its  features,  we  are  all  the 
time  exerting  ourselves  to  keep  the  boat-head  of 
industry  and  commerce  facing  in  the  right  direction, 
and  ready  to  seize  our  opportunity  for  gaining  here 
a  foot  and  there  a  yard. 

We  have  now  sketched  briefly  a  conception  of 
work  related  closely  to  the  actual  conditions  of 
daily  life,  but  yet  shot  through  with  the  great  life 
principles  of  Jesus.  It  offers  to  every  man  engaged 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  WORK  79 

in  the  world  of  business,  a  way  of  life  in  which 
Christ  in  all  things  sets  the  standard,  and  for  which 
He  also  offers  the  motive  power.  If  a  man  would 
set  his  hand  to  his  work  along  these  lines,  he  would 
not  only  be  living  what  William  James  called  “  a 
significant  life,”  however  inconspicuous  and  sub¬ 
ordinate  its  place  in  the  whole  scheme  of  things,  he 
might  be  living  all  the  day  in  communion  with 
Jesus  in  his  work  ;  and  his  failures  when  they 
came,  would  only  drive  him  back  more  resolutely 
upon  Jesus  again.  The  watchwords  for  such  a  life 
arc  the  watchwords  of  good  service,  good  workman¬ 
ship,  and  good  fellowship. 

Along  these  lines  lives  busied  with  material  pro¬ 
duction  and  bound  to  the  wheel  of  organised  special¬ 
isation,  in  shops  and  offices,  would  yet  be  charged 
writh  spiritual  ideals,  and  directly  fruitful  in  the 
service  of  the  Kingdom  of  God.  In  detail  the 
sketch  may  make  mistakes  and  leave  unanswered 
questions,  but  in  broad  outline  it  can  hardly  be 
questioned  that  here  is  a  way  of  life  which  brings  the 
appeal  of  Christ  close  home  to  the  working  life  of 
the  ordinary  man.  It  calls  him  to  repent,  if  in 
anything  his  life  is  devoted  to  useless  purposes,  if 
it  is  careless  of  quality,  if  it  is  mainly  self-seeking, 
or  if  it  is  embittered  by  irritation  or  spite.  It 
promises  him  increasing  satisfaction  in  the  develop¬ 
ment  of  his  own  personality  for  the  service  of  others, 
and  an  increasing  share  in  the  transformation  of 
the  social  machinery  of  the  world  through  the 
magic  talisman  of  goodwill — not  indeed  easily  or 
without  effort  and  failure,  but  assuredly  and 
blessedly,  on  the  honour  of  Jesus  Christ. 


% 

CHAPTER  V 

THE  CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE 

If  work  needed  a  spiritual  interpretation,  much 
more  so  does  leisure.  Work  has  been  treated  by 
moralists  at  least  with  seriousness,  though  not 
always  with  spiritual  sensitiveness  ;  but  leisure  is 
a  no-man’s  land  in  the  world’s  thinking.  To  many, 
leisure  seems  the  sporting  ground  of  all  the  devils 
that  duty  and  religion  have  to  fear.  The  great 
devils  that  destroy  the  moral  foundations  of  life 
and  the  little  devils  that  filch  away  its  finer  fruits — 
they  are  all  supposed  to  find  their  opportunity  when 
the  day’s  work  is  done.  The  arch-devils  love  the 
black  darkness  of  midnight,  but  the  little  devils  are 
all  over  us  as  soon  as  it  is  dark  in  winter  and  in 
summer  long  before  the  sun  has  set.  And  the  little 
devils  at  least  have  been  allowed  their  right  of  way 
in  the  leisure  hours  of  the  world,  because  no  one  has 
claimed  those  hours  for  the  fairies  and  the  sprites. 
When  religious  people  have  made  inroads  upon 
leisure  and  claimed  it  for  their  uses,  they  have  been 
apt  to  come  with  too  heavy  a  tread  and  so  drive 
away  the  fairies.  They  have  not  always  recognised 
the  spiritual  value  of  high  spirits  and  lighthearted¬ 
ness,  and  so  have  asked  the  world  to  make  its 
leisure  too  laborious.  They  have  come  with  an 
air  too  solemn,  a  philosophy  too  dark  for  the 

80 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  81 


occasions  of  festivity,  and  have  sometimes  un- 
wittingly  disheartened  the  attempts  of  men  to  shake 
off  the  fetters  which  wTork  so  easily  fastens  upon 
men’s  spirits.  They  have  done  so  because  they 
lacked  a  spiritual  conception  of  the  place  of  play  in 
life.  Not  having  a  complete  philosophy  of  leisure 
to  offer,  their  philosophy  of  life  has  been  prejudged 
by  this  defect  and  disregarded,  and  the  world  has 
gone  on  its  way  to  enjoy  its  leisure  according  to  its 
own  unguided  judgment — letting  the  little  devils 
have  their  fling. 

I.  The  Obvious  Uses  of  Leisure 

Some  of  the  uses  of  leisure  are,  of  course,  well 
enough  understood.  No  one  questions  the  need  of 
rest  for  minds  which  have  been  over-concentrated, 
and  for  bodies  which  have  been  over-strained.  The 
value  of  physical  exercise,  relaxation,  and  change 
of  occupation  are  not  doubted.  On  the  physical 
side,  at  least,  we  know  where  we  are  :  the  righteous, 
and  even  the  over-righteous,  join  with  the  rest  of 
the  world  in  acclaiming  these  ends  as  necessary  and 
right.  So  far,  so  good,  but  it  does  not  take  us  far 
enough.  It  is  not  enough  that  our  leisure  hours 
should  be  occupied  in  re-equipping  mind  and  body 
for  their  daily  tasks.  Leisure  should  be  used  for 
wider  purposes — for  ends  less  tightly  tied  to  the 
wheels  of  work,  and  more  delightful  in  themselves. 

In  our  present  social  order,  leisure  is  particularly 
needed  to  provide  compensation  for  the  unsatis¬ 
factoriness  of  working  life,  to  ease  faculties  which 
have  been  cramped  and  give  scope  to  tastes  which 

G 


82  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 


have  been  repressed  in  working  hours.  It  is  un¬ 
fortunately  true,  as  we  have  said  already,  that 
working  life  does  seriously  cramp  and  starve  the 
natures  of  very  many.  Modern  industrial  organisa¬ 
tion  depends  upon  a  degree  of  specialisation  in  work 
which  uses  up  one  set  of  the  worker’s  faculties  at 
the  expense  of  the  rest.  Our  work  is  geared  up  to 
the  driving  wheels  of  competition  and  mass  pro¬ 
duction.  The  pace  is  set  for  those  who  need  to  be 
kept  at  it,  lest  they  grow  slack,  and  the  standard  of 
work  is  set  to  the  abilities  of  the  less  alert.  Hence 
work,  as  we  know  it,  tends  to  dull  the  mind,  and 
blunt  the  taste,  and  fret  the  temper  of  those  who  are 
not  spiritually  forearmed  against  these  deadening 
tendencies.  We  surely  should  not  permanently 
acquiesce  in  the  degree  of  restriction  which  working 
life  now  imposes  on  many,  but  meantime  the  restric¬ 
tion  exists  and  we  have  to  meet  its  evil  consequences. 
Leisure  should  therefore  make  possible,  by  com¬ 
pensation,  a  right  recovery  of  the  balance  of  human 
nature  so  upset,  and  a  right  rebound  from  the 
compulsion  and  cramping  narrowness  of  work. 
It  should  afford  the  opportunity  for  our  giving  free 
expression  to  that  creative  deeper  self  which  our 
working  conditions  have  repressed. 

Hence  the  rebound  of  the  majority,  in  their 
leisure,  into  activities  which  give  rein  to  their 
desire  for  easy  fellowship,  excitement,  colour,  light, 
and  gaiety.  But  for  certain  elements  in  the  work- 
a-day  environment  of  average  people  the  rebound 
would  probably  be  instinctively  wise,  since  our 
natures  know  a  good  deal  naturally  of  the  best  and 
quickest  way  to  the  restoration  of  their  normal 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  83 

health.  Under  the  provocation  of  office  and  factory- 
routine  human  nature  will,  however,  react  some¬ 
times  into  forms  of  play  which  confirm  rather  than 
correct  the  evil  bias  given  to  it  by  work.  The 
rebound  may  then  result  in  corrupting  or  weakening 
excess.  Naturally,  a  depraved  taste  may  sometimes 
crave  for  the  wrong  food,  in  games  as  well  as  in 
victuals.  Just  as  the  victim  of  alcoholic  habits 
craves  for  more  alcohol,  so  do  the  victims  of  noisy 
factories  and  mind-deadening  occupations  crave 
for  rowdyism  and  mental  idleness  in  their  play. 
But  both  the  physical  and  the  mental  appetite  can 
be  persuaded  to  accept  well-chosen  alternatives. 
The  worse  the  depravity,  however,  the  better 
chosen  must  be  the  alternative — and  in  this  matter 
of  leisure  we  must,  above  all  things,  remember  that 
play  to  be  play  must  be  pleasurable.  It  must  not 
be  too  difficult,  too  much  bound  by  rules,  too  much 
like  work  in  its  demands  for  patience  and  restraint, 
too  much  under  authority  and  tutelage.  If  this 
be  kept  in  mind  the  rebound  which  must  come  from 
the  cramping  conditions  of  working  life  may  be 
so  directed  that  it  satisfies  unsatisfied  cravings, 
educates  undeveloped  faculties,  and  in  every  way 
enlarges  human  personality  and  increases  the  joy 
and  energy  of  life.  There  are  known  games  and 
enjoyments  adapted  to  most  needs,  and  the  right 
kind  of  compensation  may  generally  be  found  in 
pleasurable  forms. 

Hence  spring  the  need  for  guiding  principles  of 
play  and  the  duty  of  religious  people  to  understand 
ana  apply  them.  Some  well-meaning  folk  are 
impatient  because  youth  in  general  has  too  little 


84  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

taste  for  Bible-classes  and  improving  lectures.  They 
would  be  surprised  if  they  were  told  that  this  is  a 
pathological  condition  of  mind  needing  rather  to 
be  humoured  than  to  be  scolded,  and  due  in  some 
cases  to  the  working  conditions  they  themselves 
have  helped  to  impose  upon  youth.  But  thus  it 
is,  and  therefore  leisure  must  be  filled,  up  to  a 
point  at  least,  with  truly  congenial  and  delightful 
play,  appealing  to  the  craving  for  light  and  colour, 
amusement  and  entertainment,  and  the  easy  give 
and  take  of  irresponsible  companionship.  Forms  of 
play  can  be  devised  which  will  satisfy  all  these 
initial  requirements,  and  yet  exercise  the  spirit 
in  the  right  directions,  and  it  is  congenial  to  the 
happy  spirit  of  Christ  to  devise  them,  and  a  primary 
duty  of  Christians  to  do  so.  But  first  we  need  to 
see  what  spiritual  education  and  enrichment  play 
is  ideally  capable  of  achieving.  We  pass,  then,  to 
consider  some  of  the  higher  uses  of  leisure. 

II.  The  Higher  Uses  of  Leisure 

Still  keeping  clearly  in  mind  the  idea  that  play 
must  be  pleasurable,  it  is  possible  to  suggest  that 
it  may  minister  directly  to  many  of  the  higher 
interests  of  the  spirit.  Especially  should  it  be  of 
use  in  stirring  up  the  spiritual  appetites  which  exist 
in  human  nature  for  the  giving  of  pleasure,  for 
seeing  life  as  a  whole,  for  wider  knowledge,  for  the 
appreciation  of  beauty,  for  some  kind  of  artistic 
self-expression,  and  for  the  enjoyment  of  good 
comradeship.  I  will  speak  of  all  these  things  in 
turn. 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  85 

I.  Of  the  giving  of  pleasure  there  is  no  need  to 
say  very  much.  It  is  one  of  the  disadvantages  of 
modern  methods  of  work  that  they  make  it  so  hard 
for  the  imagination  to  picture  the  uses  to  which 
work  ministers.  And  this  deprives  the  workers  of 
one  of  the  great  incentives  to  effort,  one  of  the 
great  natural  sources  of  spiritual  nourishment. 
There  is  in  every  one  a  hunger  of  the  spirit  to 
render  personal  service  to  others,  to  see  the  pleasure 
it  gives,  and  to  reap  the  immediate  reward  of 
gratitude.  In  so  far  as  this  hunger  is  starved  in 
work,  it  should  be  fed  in  play.  The  fun  in  all  good 
games  is  the  fun  of  the  whole  game  shared  by  all, 
and  not  the  fun  which  each  gets  out  of  his  own 
performance.  The  sense  of  doing  other  people  good 
is  not  in  the  foreground  :  but  the  joy  of  each 
depends  none  the  less  upon  the  joy  of  all,  and  it  is 
the  reaction  between  pleasure  felt  and  pleasure 
given  which  raises  the  pitch  of  pleasure  to  its  proper 
height.  In  young  people,  especially,  the  joy  of 
service,  perhaps  more  often  than  not,  should  take 
the  form  of  pleasure  shared  among  equals  rather 
than  help  given  to  the  needy.  If  we  want  to  avoid 
self-consciousness  in  service,  this  is  the  form  of 
service  to  encourage,  as  through  sharing  games  it 
can  be  encouraged.  The  appeal  of  service  most 
fitted  to  win  an  entrance  into  the  heart  of  youth  and 
capture  a  share  of  youth’s  leisure  for  the  expression 
of  brotherhood  is  surely  to  be  found  just  here.  If 
it  begins  here  lustily,  it  will  not  stop  here  ;  for  the 
giving  of  pleasure  begets  the  desire  to  give  still 
more,  and  in  the  end  strengthens  the  will  to  give 
when  the  giving  is  not  pleasant  but  rather  costly. 


86  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

And  we  shall  not  make  the  mistake  of  divorcing  the 
one  kind  of  giving  from  the  other.  We  do  not  of 
course  suggest  that  the  playing  of  games  inevitably 
begets  a  generous  and  disinterested  spirit.  On 
the  contrary,  we  bear  it  in  mind  that  the  desire 
to  enjoy  oneself  has  the  other  tendency  also — the 
tendency  to  selfishness.  We  all  know  the  tennis 
player  who  has  no  use  for  any  opponent  who  cannot 
give  him  an  equal  game  ;  and  we  have  heard  of  golf- 
widows  and  the  like.  The  ideal  of  unselfishness 
needs  therefore  to  be  made  explicit  whenever  ideals 
of  play  are  presented.  But  this  it  is  quite  possible 
to  do.  Indeed,  a  large  ideal  of  unselfishness  might 
well  be  erected  with  play  as  the  material  it  works 
in,  and  builds  with.  Why  may  we  not  translate 
the  ideal  of  human  brotherhood  into  terms  of  play  ? 
Why  not  give  youth  as  part  of  its  religious  ideal  the 
aim  of  making  good  games  universally  possible  in 
every  rank  of  society  ?  Why  not  attempt  to  break 
down  all  social  barriers  by  extending  across  them 
the  fraternity  of  good  sport  ?  It  might  be  that  the 
aim  of  obliterating  all  social  barriers  and  sharing 
the  freedom  of  the  world  of  play  with  members  of 
every  rank  of  society  would  go  a  long  way  to  give 
the  idea  of  the  Kingdom  of  God  upon  earth  a  hold 
upon  youth’s  imagination.  Leagues  of  Nations  to 
overthrow  war,  and  brave  endeavours  to  eliminate 
industrial  strife  are  things  for  youth  to  dream  about 
and  manhood  to  achieve,  but  the  expression  of 
brotherhood  in  a  League  of  Play — why  should  not 
youth  set  out  to  achieve  it  to-morrow  ?  Here  is 
one  facet  at  least  of  the  Christian  ideal  of  brother¬ 
hood,  one  part  of  the  Christian  use  of  leisure. 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  87 

2.  It  is  sometimes  doubted  whether  the  spiritual 
hunger  for  knowledge  and  the  desire  to  see  life  as  a 
whole  are  universal  or  even  general.  Indeed,  it  is 
commonly  supposed  that  the  taste  for  “  education  ” 
is  a  rare  one,  and  those  who  most  feel  the  praise¬ 
worthiness  of  learning  most  often  despair  of  making 
it  popular.  And  yet  surely  there  is  in  most  people 
so  deep  and  urgent  a  need  of  seeing  life  in  perspective 
that  once  it  is  met  suitably,  the  need  is  confessed 
and  clamant.  Granted  that  it  is  not  generally 
satisfied  by  schemes  of  education  and  systems  of 
philosophy,  nevertheless  it  exists,  and  its  existence 
accounts  for  much  of  the  aimlessness  and  restless¬ 
ness  which  drive  many  to  sensationalism  in  their 
use  of  leisure.  This  need  for  a  philosophy  of  life 
is  proved  by  the  emotional  satisfaction  which  comes 
when  it  is  found.  Indeed,  no  human  being  can  have 
peace  of  mind  till  he  can  see  his  life  aims  clearly 
envisaged  and  harmonised.  We  may  grant  that 
the  taste  for  a  logical  scheme  of  life  is  not  universal, 
and  yet  assert  the  existence  of  a  real  and  genuine 
craving  to  see  life  as  a  whole — as  a  thing  of  parts 
and  proportions,  each  having  its  values,  and  to¬ 
gether  satisfying  an  instinctive  demand  for  unity. 

Setting  aside  the  desire  for  technical  equipment 
for  one’s  job — which  is  not  a  leisure  appetite  at  all, 
but  only  a  tentacle  stretched  out  from  work  to  steal 
from  leisure’s  golden  hours — the  desire  for  know¬ 
ledge  certainly  is  not  popular.  But  then,  how  dull 
is  the  diet  of  knowledge  usually  offered,  how  little 
calculated  to  whet  a  jaded  appetite  !  The  learned, 
and  those  who  offer  instruction,  are  apt  to  set  too 
low  a  value  upon  facts  and  incidents,  and  much  too 


88  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

high  a  value  upon  theories  and  systems  of  ideas. 
There  are  those  whose  nature  is  satisfied  with  that 
particular  type  of  intellectual  fare,  but  they  are 
a  minority.  They  are  a  most  useful  section  of 
the  community,  for  they  have  many  of  the  innate 
capacities  for  leadership.  Moreover,  their  needs 
are  far  too  little  regarded  by  the  Churches’  bid  for 
the  leisure  time  of  their  adherents.  For  the  sake 
of  this  minority  there  is  need  for  systematic  teaching 
of  no  low  grade,  covering  a  wide  field  of  subjects, 
and  showing  how  Christianity  interprets  and 
unifies  the  whole  world  of  living  beings.*  But  in 
the  case  of  the  majority,  the  hunger  of  the  spirit 
for  a  philosophy  of  life  must  rather  be  met  by  a 
diet  of  separate  stories  and  pictures  and  songs  in 
which  lifers  values  are  shown  in  action  and  not 
described  and  correlated  in  cross-section. 

If,  then,  leisure  is  to  minister  widely  to  youth’s 
need  for  a  true  vision  of  life  that  makes  its  moral 
principles  attractive  and  sets  them  all  aglow,  and 
if  youth’s  stagnant  intellectual  hunger  is  to  be 
stirred  to  activity,  adapted  means  of  education 
must  be  found.  The  particular  method  of  educa¬ 
tion  which  seems  to  offer  the  greatest  hope  of 
meeting  the  need  of  the  moment  is  education 
which  includes  a  right  appeal  to  the  dramatic 
sense.  Along  this  line  of  approach  it  does  seem 
possible  to  open  up  to  many  the  all  but  closed 
world  of  music,  literature,  and  art.  Till  they  have 

#  See  on  this  subject  the  report,  entitled  The  Church  as  a 
School  of  Christian  Education.  Price  one  shilling  from  the 
Young  People’s  Department  of  the  Congregational  Union, 
Memorial  Hall,  Farringdon  Street,  E.C. 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  89 

seen  life  as  an  ideal,  and  as  a  whole,  dramatically, 
the  majority  are  hardly  likely  to  want,  or  to  be 
able  to  profit  by,  the  intellectual  presentation  of 
its  satisfying  wholeness  which  appeals  to  the  few. 

3.  And  here  some  other  of  the  different  purposes 
of  leisure  already  named  come  into  view.  Among 
these  is  the  use  of  leisure  to  satisfy  the  spirit’s  demand 
for  beauty,  and  provide  it  with  some  congenial  form  of 
spiritual  self-expression .  In  the  arts  of  drama  and 
music,  and  to  a  lesser  extent  the  arts  of  speech  and 
song,  we  most  of  us  can  find  our  opportunity  for 
spiritual  self-expression  and  for  beauty.  In  the 
chapter  which  follows  I  shall  deal  particularly  with 
the  spiritual  appeal  of  beauty.  Here  I  will  only 
anticipate  that  treatment  by  suggesting  that 
worship  is  hardly  possible  to  those  who  do  not 
exercise  the  aesthetic  side  of  their  personalities, 
whilst  the  pursuit  of  ideals  is  hardly  possible  to 
those  who  do  not  first  make  their  ideals  real  to 
themselves  in  the  realm  of  the  imagination.  We 
can  only  worship  if  we  have  learned  to  contemplate 
and  admire.  We  can  only  live  well  when  goodness 
and  nobility  have  fired  our  souls.  And  if  the 
practice  of  admiring  goodness  and  discriminating 
between  better  and  best  is  to  be  acquired,  is  there 
any  more  favourable  medium  for  acquiring  it  than 
through  a  wTell-considered  appeal  to  the  dramatic 
sense  ?  All  the  arts  have  in  them  the  possibility 
of  educating  the  spirit,  but  the  dramatic  art  has  an 
advantage  over  the  others  in  its  power  to  combine 
them  all.  More  will  be  said  on  this  matter  before 
the  chapter  closes,  meantime,  one  other  of  the  uses 
of  leisure  claims  our  notice. 


90  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 


III.  Comradeship  in  Leisure 

4.  A  final  feature  of  the  value  of  leisure  to  the 
life  of  the  spirit  is  the  opportunity  which  it  affords 
for  comradeship  and  for  education  in  comradeship . 
As  compared  with  work  it  brings  us  more  into 
association  with  people  of  temperaments  congenial 
to  our  own.  We  are  thus  enabled  to  learn,  in  an 
easier  medium,  to  exercise  our  faculty  for  friendship. 
It  is  therefore  important  to  work  out  the  meaning 
And  demands  of  fellowship  in  terms  of  play .  Having 
laid  it  down  as  a  principle  that  the  acceptance  of  the 
Lordship  of  Christ  means  not  the  repudiation  of 
play,  or  its  fearfully  guarded  use,  but  the  expression 
in  real  hilarity  of  the  spirit  of  joy  which  Christ 
exemplified  and  enjoined,  and  having  thus  enlisted 
play  as  an  ally,  instead  of  alienating  it  as  a  rival, 
we  may  go  on  to  lay  down  positive  demands. 

Thus  we  can  urge  that  those  games  should  be 
cultivated  which  develop  the  team  spirit,  and  the 
sporting  attitude  to  difficult  tasks  and  personal 
injuries, — not,  for  example,  endorsing  the  Hindu 
boy  essayist’s  impression  of  football  as  a  bad  game, 
“  because  if  your  opponent  injures  you  in  the  game 
you  cannot  sue  him  at  law  !  ”  We  can  insist  that 
play  should  run  into  channels  which  will  cause  it, 
whilst  remaining  play,  to  minister  to  the  joys  of 
others.  We  can  plead  for  those  forms  of  recreation 
which  taken  together  will  minister  to  every  side  of 
our  nature,  including,  for  example,  the  intellectual 
and  artistic  sides.  We  can  ask  that  youth  will  put 
its  recreations  under  restraint  when  they  tend  to  spoil 
the  sport  of  others,  as  in  fast  motor  cycling,  and  to 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  91 

forego  altogether  the  forms  of  play  which  lead  their 
friends  into  temptation,  as  certain  forms  of  dancing 
tempt  some  to  exhaust  or  over-stimulate  themselves. 

In  these  ways  we  can  make  the  spirit  of  play  a 
handmaid  to  the  spirit  of  human  love  and  friend¬ 
ship.  And  if  we  do  this  we  can  show,  on  a  large 
canvas  and  in  bright  colours  that  all  comradeship, 
even  the  comradeship  which  is  engendered  in  the 
byways  of  pleasure,  is  comradeship  which  can  be 
governed  by  ideals  of  the  spirit.  Our  friendships 
will  always  be  second-rate  and  liable  to  corruption, 
unless  they  are  friendships  in  the  pursuit  of  things 
worth  while  in  themselves ;  friendships  indeed  in 
the  quest  of  ideals.  Friendship  in  play  thus  comes 
to  be  an  integral  part  of  the  Christian  ideal  of  life 
so  soon  as  we  realise  that  there  is  in  Christianity  a 
spiritual  ideal  of  hilarity  and  an  obligation  to  find 
ever  more  and  more  satisfying  expressions  of  beauty 
and  joy. 

And  when  the  spiritual  basis  of  play  has  been 
thus  affirmed  we  reach  a  conception  of  comradeship 
that  makes  it  not  difficult  to  forearm  youth  against 
the  temptation  to  sacrifice  the  joys  of  the  spirit  to  the 
joys  of  the  flesh  in  the  wonderfully  alluring  relations 
of  sex.  Let  it  be  understood  that  all  our  instincts 
for  sense  delight  are  in  themselves  natural,  pure, 
and  capable  of  yielding  divine  beauty  and  satis¬ 
faction.  But  let  it  also  be  made  clear  as  the 
condition  of  this  that  we  remember  always  that  we 
and  our  friends  are  spiritual  persons  with  many- 
sided  natures  to  satisfy,  and  eternity  in  which  to 
find  our  complete  fulfilment,  so  that  we  must  not 
spoil  the  good  gifts  God  has  given  us  by  carelessness 


92  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

of  their  proper  use  and  limitation,  or  haste  and 
greediness  in  seizing  more  than  is  right.  The  full 
fine  flavour  of  joy  is  only  possible  to  us  if  in  our 
pleasures  we  remember  always  God  and  our  fellows. 
If  we  do  this  our  impulses  for  enjoyment  will  be 
directed  into  channels  where  each  will  have  its  best 
result,  for  they  will  have  ceased  to  war  with  one 
another. 

Granted  this  ideal  of  leisure  we  may  take  the 
instincts  of  young  people  for  play  and  comradeship 
as  we  find  them,  and  train  them  to  a  Christian 
expression  in  organised  social  groups.  And  this 
we  should  do  rather  than  set  before  them  a  picture 
of  leisure,  staidly  and  usefully  employed,  which 
we  call  Christian,  and  ask  them  to  accept  as  part 
of  the  yoke  of  Christ.  The  Boy  Scout  and  Girl 
Guide  Movements  illustrate  the  value  of  associating 
boys  and  girls  in  social  units  which  live  together  a 
life  of  many-sided  interest.  This  life  may  be  made 
so  attractive  in  its  variety  of  common  occupations 
that  it  is  worth  while  for  the  individual  to  obey  its 
rules  and  live  for  its  honour,  and  so  the  first 
principles  of  self-surrender  to  the  larger  social  unit 
are  acquired.  The  idea  ought  surely  to  be  carried 
further  by  the  formation  of  many  other  types 
of  group,  and  especially  those  adapted  to  older 
adolescents  and  young  men  and  women.  The  aim 
in  each  would  be  that  common  interests  should  lead 
to  common  forms  of  happy,  natural,  self-expression, 
tending  always  increasingly  towards  ideals  of  ser¬ 
vice  ;  though  the  companionship  would  not  be 
founded  exclusively  upon  these  ideals.  The  move¬ 
ments  already  spoken  of  would  seem  to  show  that 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  93 

if  you  can  associate  boys  and  girls  for  the  purpose 
of  doing  things  which  it  is  a  pleasure  to  do,  and 
keep  uppermost  all  the  time  the  idea  that  one  must 
play  the  game  with  one’s  fellows,  the  life  of  the 
group  tends  naturally  to  help  its  members  to  be 
their  best  at  work  and  play.  With  older  groups 
it  should  not  be  difficult  to  lead  on  to  the  idea  of 
mutual  responsibility  in  moral  struggles — and  teach 
that  each  must  help  his  neighbours  where  he  can. 
The  Regnal  League  has  shown  how  strong  a 
comradeship  can  be  based  upon  such  loyalties  as 
these. 

It  is,  of  course,  vital  that  all  such  groups  should 
have  their  true  psychological  unity.  In  the  late 
adolescent  and  junior  adult  periods  of  life,  the 
make-believe,  adventure  interest,  which  forms  the 
psychological  basis  of  the  Scout  and  Guide  Move¬ 
ment,  has  to  give  way  to  something  different. 
Perhaps  the  instinct  for  drama  and  dance  is  the  key 
to  the  psychological  basis  for  the  social  grouping 
of  adolescence.  Both  these  throw  boys  and  girls 
together  and  so  afford  the  opportunity  for  an 
education  in  a  fellowship  wffiich  is  no  longer  the 
unisexual  affair  of  earlier  life.  Here  comes  the 
opportunity  to  unfold  ideals  of  fellowship  in  which 
the  sense  appeal  of  the  physical  is  made  the  friend, 
and  not,  as  it  may  otherwise  become,  the  foe,  of  a 
bigger  spiritual  purpose.  Fellowship  in  leisure  is 
thus  associated  first  with  the  more  primitive  un¬ 
moralised  instincts  for  sense  delight,  and  afterwards 
with  the  attempt  to  give  delightful  expression  (as 
in  drama)  to  developed  moral  ideals.  From  that  it 
wrould  be  natural  to  lead  on  by  stages  to  forms 


94  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

of  social  or  political  service  adapted  to  maturer 
groups,  or  to  some  harder  educational  activity 
which  they  would  take  on  for  the  sake  of  their 
further  equipment  and  fuller  intercourse,  or  to  some 
sort  of  inter-class  fellowship  which  would  help 
to  counteract  the  class  isolation  of  working  life. 
Provided  the  more  elementary  social  instincts  and 
constructive  energies  of  the  group  have  been 
enlisted  first,  this  does  not  seem  an  unlikely  or 
unnatural  process. 

IV.  Leisure  and  the  Church 

If  these  things  are  true  they  bear  closely  on  the 
work  of  the  Church.  If  games  and  music,  literature 
and  the  drama,  no  less  than  Bible-classes  and  prayer- 
meetings,  can  be  made  into  the  antechambers  of 
religion,  the  whole  handling  of  leisure  by  some 
Churches  should  undergo  a  change.  In  the  main, 
it  seems,  the  Churches  have  divorced  intellectual 
culture  from  aesthetic  culture,  valuing  the  former 
as  “  spiritual  ”  and  deprecating  the  other  as 
“  sensuous.”  And  while  games  and  enjoyments 
have  been  encouraged  in  the  Church’s  programme, 
they  have  been  valued  chiefly  for  their  indirect 
importance — as  harmless  occupations  for  those 
who  might  otherwise  be  worse  employed  ;  or  as  a 
means  of  discharging  surplus  energies  which  might 
otherwise  be  hard  to  control ;  or  even  as  baits  to 
the  unwilling,  or  coating  for  the  religious  pill. 
They  have  not  been  regarded  as  spiritual  activities 
befitting  the  leisure  of  mankind  in  general  and 
youth  in  particular,  and  so  capable  of  providing  the 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  95 

medium  for  a  progressive  education  in  the  things 
of  the  spirit. 

But  if,  as  we  think,  the  natural  form  of  spiritual 
expression,  for  youth  especially,  is  in  a  many-sided 
comradeship  in  play,  it  is  the  Church’s  business  in 
some  way  or  other  to  foster  the  comradeship  of 
good  play,  regarding  it  as  one  of  its  most  important 
points  of  contact  with  those  not  yet  ready  for  all 
that  it  has  to  teach  them.  By  psychological  and 
spiritual  necessity  people  make  demands  upon 
religion  according  to  their  experience  of  life,  and 
since  young  people  are  in  the  main  preoccupied 
with  the  light  side  of  life,  the  demand  they  make 
upon  religion  is  for  enjoyment  without  alloy. 
Granted  that  the  deepest  things  in  religion  only 
come  home  to  the  soul  when  it  has  tasted  the  bitter 
things  in  life,  to  demand  such  depth  of  the  young  is 
to  ask  them  to  be  old  before  their  time.  Hence 
the  one  irreplaceable  point  of  contact  of  the  Church 
with  youth  is  in  the  provision  of  facilities  for  the 
natural  expression  of  their  high  spirits,  their 
comradeship,  and  their  love  of  beauty. 

Whether  the  Church  can  use  these  means  of 
spiritual  education  and  make  them  into  real  “  means 
of  grace  ”  will  depend  upon  its  regarding  these 
play  activities  as  spiritual  ends  in  themselves — 
however  partial  and  incomplete — and  not  mere 
means  to  other  spiritual  ends  from  which  they 
are  distinct  in  essence.  The  physical,  social,  and 
aesthetic  activities  of  young  people  are  to  be  regarded 
as  an  integral  part,  though  not  the  whole,  of  their 
true  spiritual  expression.  Since  they  are  a  part  of 
the  spiritual  life,  they  should  be  claimed  as  such$ 


9 6  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

and  since  they  are  only  a  part  they  should  not  be 
isolated  from  the  other,  deeper,  and  fuller  expres¬ 
sions  of  the  spirit.  And,  for  that  to  be  the  case, 
Christianity  needs  in  some  way  to  be  recognised  as 
the  foster-mother  of  pure  play.  This  means  that 
Christian  leaders  should  promote  and  guide  the 
leisure  activities  of  young  people, — though  whether 
provision  should  be  made  separately  for  each  in¬ 
dividual  Church,  or  group  of  Churches,  or  whether  it 
should  be  for  the  community  of  youth  in  general  may 
be  an  open  question.  But  in  either  case  the  leader¬ 
ship  should  be  as  far  as  possible  in  Christian  hands, 
in  order  to  ensure  that  ends  which  are  partial  shall  be 
attained  under  the  guidance  of  minds  which  see  them 
in  the  true  perspective  of  human  life  as  a  whole. 

Out  of  such  true  comradeship  in  the  appropriate 
spiritual  interests  of  youth,  there  should  naturally 
spring  (without  any  “  forcing  ”  and  under  steady 
but  unobtrusive  leadership)  the  desire  for  further 
self-fulfilment,  and  in  particular  for  service  and 
abandonment  to  the  highest.  And  this  natural 
awakening  of  deeper  desires,  whenever  it  may 
occur,  will  provide  the  true  spiritual  opportunity 
for  an  appeal  for  dedication  to  the  fuller  and  more 
inclusive  ideals  of  life.  But  such  development  will 
not  be  natural  unless  the  leadership  provided  by  the 
Church  is  of  those  who  are  as  sensitive  to  the 
spiritual  values  of  play  as  they  are  to  those  of 
service,  work,  and  worship.  A  good  response  will 
be  not  only  natural,  but  probable,  if  the  leadership 
in  leisure  is  thus  supplied  by  those  who  are  sensitive 
to  spiritual  values  of  all  degrees.  And  when  youth 
does  awaken  in  this  way  to  the  wider  and  deeper 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  97 

purposes  of  life,  and  to  the  more  strenuous  tasks  of 
the  Church,  its  loyalty  to  them  will  be  all  the 
stronger  as  it  reflects  that  the  Church  has  all  the 
time  been  guiding  its  life  and  comradeship  along  a 
true  and  satisfying  line. 

The  question  of  the  precise  relation  of  the 
Church  as  an  institution  to  the  recreative  life  of  the 
community  lies  outside  the  province  of  this  book. 
Some  have  proposed  that  it  should  be  a  part  of  the 
united  evangelistic  activity  of  the  Churches  to 
provide  recreative  clubs  in  sufficient  variety  and 
numbers  to  meet  the  needs  of  all.  Others  might 
wish  to  let  the  recreative  life  around  them  develop 
under  non-religious  auspices,  trusting  to  the  in¬ 
fluence  of  individuals  inspired  by  the  Churches  to 
throw  in  their  lot  with  it  and  use  it  as  a  means  of 
moral  and  spiritual  education.  Others,  again,  will 
feel  unable  to  attempt  to  influence  more  than  the 
recreative  life  of  their  own  immediate  adherents. 
The  matter  is  one  for  discussion  and  experiment. 
But  in  any  case  we  must  be  prepared  to  allow  great 
freedom  to  youth — to  choose  and  direct  its  own 
course,  and  at  the  same  time  trust  to  the  spiritual 
influence  of  those  whose  religion  makes  them  good 
fellows,  convinced  sportsmen  and  genuine  artists, 
to  see  that  though  many  things  are  done  which 
are  inartistic  and  immature,  an  upward  spiritual 
tendency  is  felt  through  the  whole.  Without 
attempting  to  settle  this  question  of  official  relation¬ 
ship,  I  return  in  conclusion  to  examine  in  more 
detail  the  potentialities  for  spiritual  education  of  a 
form  of  recreation  already  frequently  referred  to, 
namely  the  dramatic  form. 


H 


98  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

V.  The  Spiritual  Potentialities  of  Drama 

The  dramatic  method  has  recently  been  gaining 
considerable  prominence  as  a  means  of  general 
education.  This  point,  among  others,  is  of  interest 
to  us,  but  it  is  not  our  chief  point.  It  is  with  the 
drama  as  a  means  of  expressing  the  Christian  spirit 
and  ideal  and  of  illustrating  the  beauty  of  the 
Christian  motive  and  practice,  and  thus  of  stimu¬ 
lating  the  Christian  will  and  emotions  that  we  are 
specially  concerned.  In  other  words,  we  approach 
the  subject  from  the  standpoint  of  the  Christian 
Gospel,  and  not  merely  from  the  standpoint  of 
moral  culture. 

Of  the  value  of  the  dramatic  method  for  kindling 
imagination  and  arousing  emotion,  we  need  say 
little.  *  Educators  are  suggesting  that  in  some  form 
or  other  it  is  the  supreme  method  for  presenting 
moral  ideas,  and  that  it  is  only  by  associating 
literature  and  music  and  the  arts  of  representation 
with  big  moral  ideas  that  you  can  fire  the  minds 
of  boys  and  girls  with  enthusiasm  for  goodness, 
truth,  and  beauty.  This  point  of  view  is  argued 
with  good  effect  by  Dr.  Hayward  and  Arnold 
Freeman  in  Fhe  Spiritual  Foundations  of  Recon¬ 
struction.  This  book  contains  examples  of  the  way 
in  which  the  principle  may  be  applied  in  schools  to 
the  dramatic  presentation  of  the  achievements  of 
great  ideals.  Thus,  for  example,  Democracy,  The 
League  of  Nations,  Shakespeare,  and  the  Apostle 
Paul,  are  successively  made  the  subject  of  these 
“  Celebrations,”  as  they  are  called.  More  of  these 
examples  are  given  in  Dr.  Hayward’s  volume  of 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  99 

School  Celebrations,  whilst  the  more  general  applica¬ 
tion  of  the  same  ideas  is  made  in  Arnold  Freeman’s 
Education  through  Settlements . 

These  writers  argue  that  the  establishment  of 
such  new  celebrations  as  Empire  Day  (1907),  St. 
David’s  Day  (191 5),  Shakespeare  Day  (1916),  marks 
not  only  a  new  departure  in  education,  but  is  an 
admission  that  the  ideas  with  which  these  celebra¬ 
tions  are  concerned  were  not  in  fact  being  taught 
effectively  in  Scripture  lessons,  or  by  other  forms  of 
class  instruction.  The  same  failure  is  implied  in 
the  demand  that  is  made  by  various  societies  for 
special  teaching  to  be  given  regarding,  for  example, 
temperance,  gambling,  thrift,  peace,  eugenics,  kind¬ 
ness  to  animals,  etc.  The  writers,  indeed,  afhrm 
that  the  right  attitude  to  such  subjects  cannot  be 
taught  by  the  ordinary  school  methods.  It  is  not 
so  much  to  be  learned  as  imbibed.  What  is  needful, 
and  what  is  aimed  at  in  their  proposal,  is  that  great 
moral  ideas  should  not  be  “  mere  ideas,”  cold, 
verbal,  and  isolated,  but  that  they  should  come  into 
the  mind  with  a  certain  momentum  or  background, 
with  a  certain  massiveness  and  atmosphere.  They 
ask,  therefore,  that  the  class  teaching  of  the  Bible, 
of  literature,  of  music,  history,  and  certain  other 
subjects,  should  be  largely  abolished  in  favour  of  a 
liturgical,  ceremonial,  or  celebrational  treatment, 
which  they  hold  to  be  more  emotionally  effective  than 
mere  instruction.  Incidentally  they  hold  that  “  great 
art  ”  would  bridge  the  gap  between  the  traditional 
and  ineffective  methods  of  the  Church  when  it  in¬ 
vades  the  School  with  its  religious  instruction,  and 
the  bare  and  unimpressive  proposals  of  the  secularist. 


100  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

Dramatic  work  calls  for  consideration  first 
because  of  its  value  to  the  performers.  For  them 
it  is  an  exercise  in  memory  work,  in  promptitude, 
in  accurate  observation,  in  self-subordination  to  a 
purpose,  in  good  team  work.  This  in  itself  is  a 
good  deal.  There  is  also  training  in  the  power  to 
put  oneself  in  another’s  place,  and  see  things  from 
another’s  point  of  view  ;  and  since  identification  is 
essential  to  true  sympathy  with  others,  drama  may 
thus  have  a  big  contribution  to  make  to  religious 
training.  But  there  is  still  more  than  that.  There 
is  aesthetic  as  well  as  moral  training — the  training 
in  the  beauty  of  the  fitting  phrase  or  gesture,  the 
telling  costume,  or  general  scenic  effect ;  the  training 
in  appreciation  of  emotional  emphasis  and  restraint. 
Emerson  has  declared  that  when  the  aesthetic  sense 
is  debased,  the  moral  sense  is  usually  debased  also, 
and  William  McDougall  also  in  his  Social  Psychology 
asserts  that  the  aesthetic  appreciation  of  fine 
character  is  a  necessary  part  of  its  appeal.  If 
these  things  are  so,  it  would  seem  that  the  religious 
sense  of  many  has  been  cut  from  some  of  its  roots 
by  their  lack  of  aesthetic  education. 

Moreover,  a  good  play  should  have  the  same 
value  for  intelligent  and  attentive  spectators  on 
the  one  hand  as  for  efficient  and  conscientious  per¬ 
formers  on  the  other.  The  performers  are  con¬ 
sciously,  corporately,  and  actively  striving  to  bring 
out  the  meaning  of  the  play.  The  spectators  are 
endeavouring  to  appreciate,  though  more  passively, 
that  same  central  idea,  and  emotionally  to  share  in 
it  ;  and  thus  players  and  spectators  are  united  in  a 
fellowship  of  thought  and  emotion.  Christianity 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  ioi 


lends  itself  to  such  dramatic  treatment  since  it 
appeared  as  a  life  lived  before  it  became  a  set  of 
ideas  preached.  It  is  a  way  of  life — the  incarnation 
of  a  divine  spirit.  It  is,  therefore,  in  its  very  quality 
dramatic,  and  can  only  be  adequately  expressed  in 
the  action  of  life,  that  is  drama.  It  is  best  recom¬ 
mended  by  being  shown  and  seen.  Undoubtedly,  if 
an  idea  can  be  expressed  in  dramatic  form  it  will 
both  secure  a  much  bigger  audience  and  make  a 
much  deeper  impression  than  if  it  is  presented  in 
abstract  terms  in  lecture,  book,  or  sermon.  The 
question  is  how  far  the  specific  Christian  message 
can  be  presented  dramatically.  Would  it  be 
possible,  for  example,  to  hold  a  dramatic  evangel¬ 
istic  mission  ?  If  it  would,  it  would  incidentally 
enable  at  least  twice  as  many  people  as  now 
to  take  part  in  public  evangelism.  We  have  Ober- 
ammergau  and  the  Bethlehem  Tableaux  to  suggest 
possibilities. 

In  the  Middle  Ages,  plays  were  written  by 
priests  and  acted  by  their  flock  in  their  Churches. 
The  drama  was  a  normal  and  recognised  vehicle  of 
Christian  teaching  and  culture.  It  was  used  to 
illustrate  Christian  character — to  show  sins  and 
virtues  in  action  and  consequence  both  in  this 
world  and  the  next.  The  dramatists  at  length 
resented  the  limitations  imposed  on  their  art  by 
the  narrow  range  of  subjects  provided  by  the 
Church  and  the  Bible,  and  interested  themselves 
with  the  wider  range  provided  by  the  common  life 
about  them  and  the  historical  records  to  which 
they  had  recourse.  The  breakaway  from  ecclesi¬ 
astical  control  was  all  to  the  good,  but  that  is  no 


102  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

reason  why  diama  should  not  return  to  those 
themes  which  once  it  portrayed  so  effectively  to  the 
uneducated  population  of  Tudor  and  Elizabethan 
England.  At  the  same  time  there  are  plenty  of 
modern  plays  which  have  made  a  success  in  the 
ordinary  theatre  to  prove  to  us  the  possibility  of 
expressing  high  ideals  and  Christian  motives  through 
the  drama  without  its  being  fettered  to  the  older 
themes. 

One  great  objection  to  the  whole  procedure  is, 
of  course,  the  traditional  and  still,  in  some  circles, 
fairly  widespread  prejudice  among  the  older  folk 
who  carry  on  the  work  of  the  Church  against 
dramatic  activity  of  every  kind.  They  fear  that 
we  may  simply  encourage  interest  in  a  side  of  life 
which  usually  tends  to  frivolity  or  worse,  because 
its  associations  are  bad  and  its  development  un-ideal. 
There  are,  however,  some  who  think  that  the  alleged 
prejudice  against  the  drama  in  the  Churches  is 
exaggerated,  and  that  the  suspicion  of  the  old- 
fashioned  would  soon  be  dispelled  by  the  production 
of  a  few  artistic  Christian  plays.  Meantime,  all 
over  the  country,  churches  are  going  in  for  dramatic 
art,  though,  unfortunately,  for  want  of  guiding 
principles,  most  of  them  are  doing  silly  farces, 
vulgar  and  poor  in  every  way.  Nor  is  the  trouble 
confined  to  this  country  alone ;  only  this  week 
there  comes  to  my  hand  a  cry  of  distress  from  a 
Christian  community  in  Madagascar  embarrassed 
by  the  dramatic  propensities  of  its  young  people, 
and  without  a  clue  to  their  wise  direction.  Even 
where  the  dramatic  method  is  held  to  be  good  in 
itself,  the  suspicion  fingers  that  it  may  not  be  right 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  103 

to  use  it  for  the  expression  of  the  best  and  deepest 
things  in  life.  This  perhaps  points  to  a  special 
development  of  the  dramatic  method  for  Church 
purposes,  and  it  may  be  that  Pageantry  and  the 
“  Celebrations  ”  already  referred  to  show  the  way 
to  this.  In  the  Celebrations,  music,  painting, 
literature,  recitation,  and  song  are  all  made  use  of  ; 
but  very  little  action  is  employed.  Such  adapta¬ 
tions  of  the  drama  may  prove,  if  not  the  goal  of 
Christian  dramatics,  a  useful  half-way  house. 

The  chief  difficulty  felt  at  the  moment  by  those 
who  take  a  positive  view  of  the  spiritual  possi¬ 
bilities  of  the  drama,  is  the  dearth  of  plays  that 
are  suitable.  There  is  not  much  that  is  at  the 
same  time  good  enough  and  simple  enough  for 
amateur  performers.  The  Adult  School  Movement, 
30,  Bloomsbury  Street,  W.C.,  publishes  a  setting  of 
Tolstoy’s  Where  Love  is ,  God  is.  There  are  a  number 
of  missionary  plays  and  some  mediaeval  mystery 
plays  available,  but  there  are  those  who  think  that 
it  would  be  a  pity  to  cramp  a  modern  Christian 
drama  with  ancient  conventionalities,  that  the 
Church  has  already  suffered  too  much  from  the 
tyranny  of  mediaevalism,  and  that  there  is  no  need 
to  revert  to  the  crudeness  of  the  miracle  and 
morality  plays  for  our  material,  the  modern  theatre 
having  already  presented  us  with  a  more  suitable 
instrument  for  the  purposes  of  a  Christian  dramatic 
art,  in  the  work  of  modern  serious  dramatists  like 
Jerome  and  Drinkwater,  Galsworthy  and  Bernard 
Shaw.  Of  this  material  Drinkwater’s  Cromwell  and 
Lincoln  are  highly  praised  by  those  who  have  used 
them  for  Church  purposes,  but  there  are  proprietary 


io4  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

rights  which  may  not  be  infringed.  The  adaptation 
of  some  standard  novels  is  also  suggested,  and  The 
Passing  of  the  Third  Floor  Back  may  possibly  be 
commended  in  spite  of  its  sentimentality  and 
obtrusive  preachiness.  From  the  point  of  view  of 
evangelism,  the  most  urgent  need  is  for  plays  that 
will  present  the  great  Christian  ideals  and  demands. 
Galsworthy,  it  is  thought,  leaves  out  “  Redemp¬ 
tion.”  Shaw  leaves  out  “  The  Cross.”  Drink- 
water  comes  nearest,  but  he  leaves  out  the  Church  ! 
These  men  can  write  plays  that  preach  on  “  The 
wages  of  sin  is  death,”  or  “  Be  sure  your  sin  will 
find  you  out,”  but  something  is  wanted  that  will 
grip  the  soul  where  they  leave  off.  Mediaeval 
mystery  plays  are  not  satisfactory  for  this  purpose, 
for  they  leave  a  sense  of  unreality  that  only  confirms 
indecision;  and  plays  in  which  Bible  narratives  are 
presented  have,  as  a  rule,  a  similar  defect.  We 
still  await  the  production  of  plays  which  embody 
the  full  gospel  appeal. 

We  have,  meantime,  a  little  testimony  to  the 
revolutionary  spiritual  effect  of  such  plays  as  we 
have,  and  it  is  probable  that  much  more  could  be 
gathered.  There  can  be  little  doubt  that  thousands 
of  young  people  in  this  country  owe  their  interest 
in  the  missionary  enterprise  primarily  to  their  part 
in  some  dramatic  representation.  The  study  of 
the  life  and  character  of  Livingstone  by  those  who 
were  asked  to  personate  him  has,  for  example, 
marked  a  spiritual  crisis  in  more  lives  than  one, 
and  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  dramatic  repre¬ 
sentation  of  the  story  of  The  Mayflower.  In  many 
instances  some  piece  of  service  rendered  in  such 


CHRISTIAN  CONCEPTION  OF  LEISURE  105 

dramatic  performances  has  been  the  first  intro¬ 
duction  to  the  wider  service  of  the  Church.  The 
work  of  the  Guild  of  Missionary  Players  and  similar 
bodies  has  in  like  manner  done  much  to  arouse  the 
interest  of  still  larger  bodies  of  spectators.*  In  the 
view  of  those  who  have  watched  this  matter  most 
closely,  the  method  could  be  applied  more  widely 
and  for  the  most  direct  and  personal  of  religious 
appeals.  The  method  which  has  been  found  so 
useful  in  generating  interest  in  foreign  missions 
and  church  history,  might  also  be  used  in  wise 
hands,  as  an  evangelistic  means  of  winning  men 
to  a  personal  faith  in  the  Gospel  of  Christ.  | 


*  Information  about  Missionary  Plays  can  be  obtained  from 
the  Missionary  Societies’  Headquarters;  whilst  information  of  a 
more  general  kind  might  be  sought  from  The  Educational  Settle¬ 
ments  Association,  30,  Bloomsbury  Street,  W.C. 

t  The  St.  Martin’s  Players,  of  St.  Martin’s  Church,  Trafalgar 
Square,  have  produced,  I  am  told,  a  Pageant  of  the  Spirit  of 
Christ. 


CHAPTER  VI 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT 

In  the  sketch  just  given  of  the  Christian  conception 
of  life,  we  have  had  to  keep  always  in  view  three 
quite  distinct,  though  closely  interwoven,  sets 
of  relationships.  Whether  it  be  in  Work  or  in 
Leisure,  the  Christian  has  to  perfect  his  relations 
with  God,  with  his  fellows,  and  with  the  material 
world.  The  Christian  religion  is  peculiar  among 
all  religions  in  the  close  connection  it  maintains 
between  the  first  and  second  groups  of  these 
relations  :  to  love  God  and  not  love  our  neighbour 
is  for  Christianity  unthinkable  ;  to  show  love  to 
our  neighbour  is,  says  Jesus,  to  show  love  to  Him. 
That  is  a  Christian  commonplace  no  one  denies  ; 
and  though  few  do  justice  to  it,  elaboration  of  the 
point  wTould  serve  no  useful  purpose.  It  is  merely 
necessary  to  reaffirm  it  before  passing  on  to  another 
point,  complementary  to  this,  and  not  to  be  taken 
as  diminishing  its  importance,  viz.,  the  connection 
between  our  relations  with  God  and  our  relations 
with  the  material  world.  This,  too,  is  of  primary 
importance,  whether  for  work  or  leisure,  and  our 
neglect  of  it  may  account  for  a  good  deal  of  our 
failure  to  perfect  our  other  relations  with  God  and 
man. 

106 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  107 

The  average  Christian  who  takes  his  religion 
seriously  is  apt  to  have  not  very  much  religious 
enthusiasm  for  perfecting  the  relations  of  his 
business  life.  He  may  take  these  relations  quite 
“  religiously  ”  as  we  say,  meaning  painstakingly, 
and  may  try  to  fulfil  them  honourably  ;  but  his 
pulse  does  not  beat  high  with  the  thought  of  what 
he  may  be  able  to  accomplish  for  Christ  in  that 
sphere.  Whilst  he  will  be  ardent  about  the  success 
of  his  favourite  missionary  society,  or  the  progress 
of  his  Church,  or  the  response  of  his  Sunday 
scholars  to  his  teaching,  his  thoughts  are  cold  and 
grey  when  they  turn  to  business.  Though  there 
may  be  countless  exceptions,  this  is  probably  the 
rule.  But  why  is  this  ?  Is  it  not  because  in 
business  the  Christian  thinks  he  is  in  a  world  of 
material  values,  and  it  is  only  the  spiritual  values 
which  are  really  interesting  ?  He  does  not  really 
think  you  can  sell  tea  or  cotton  to  the  glory  of  God. 

So,  too,  the  average  Christian  who  is  earnest 
and  self-sacrificing  may  enjoy  good  music  and  fine 
pictures,  but  he  has  doubts  whether,  for  instance,  his 
enjoyment  of  good  music  ranks  equal  in  spirituality 
with  his  enjoyment  of,  say,  good  sermons.  The 
art  and  play  side  of  life  are  necessary  to  the 
weakness  of  mortal  flesh,  which  cannot  sustain  a 
high  note  for  long  at  a  time.  They  refresh  the 
body  and  the  brain,  but  they  are  more  likely  to 
entangle  the  spirit  than  to  edify  it.  Many  may 
think  this  statement  grossly  exaggerated,  and  yet 
they  will  probably  find  that  enjoyment  and  religion 
stand  in  the  minds  of  the  vast  multitude  of  their 
fellow  countrymen  as  either  opposed  or  indifferent 


io8  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

to  one  another  ;  and  that  the  typical  attitude  of  the 
spokesmen  of  religion  to  such  things  as  artists  and 
theatres  is  well  calculated  to  create  this  popular 
impression.  Spirit  and  matter  are  conceived  as 
being  normally  at  war. 

To  me  it  is  simply  unthinkable  that  industry  will 
be  dominated  by  the  Spirit  of  Christ  until  Christian 
people  come  to  believe  that  the  handling  of  material 
things  is  meant  to  be  sacramental — everywhere  and 
always — and  that  in  every  action  and  transaction 
in  commerce  and  manufacture,  just  as  in  every  jest 
and  every  sport,  whilst  there  is  a  way  of  doing  the 
thing  that  is  just  soporific  to  the  spirit,  and  a  way 
that  may  be  actually  poisonous,  there  is  certainly 
a  way  that  is  strictly  and  literally  to  the  glory  of 
God.  Nor  is  it  credible  that  our  social  life  will 
become  friendly  till  social  employments  and  enjoy¬ 
ments  are  all  valued  as  spiritual  ends  in  themselves. 
44  Whether  you  eat  or  whether  you  drink/5  says  the 
Apostle,  44  or  whatsoever  you  do,  in  word  or  deed, 
do  all  to  the  glory  of  God.”  And,  if  you  please, 
the  glory  of  God  is  not  to  be  manifested  simply  by  a 
wise  moderation  in  eating  and  drinking,  but  by  a 
true  appreciation.  God’s  glory  is  to  be  found  in 
good  victuals,  not  only  because  they  are  useful,  but 
because  they  are  delightful.  God’s  bounty  is 
declared  in  the  enjoyment  which  He  has  added  to 
what  might  otherwise  be  the  tedious  occupation 
of  bodily  nourishment.  Some  one  once  expressed 
surprise  to  the  poet  Tennyson  on  witnessing  his 
delight  in  a  meal  of  roast  beef  and  boiled  potatoes. 
44  All  fine-natured  men,”  was  his  reply,  44  know 
what  is  good  to  eat.” 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  109 

The  truth  is  that  the  life  of  the  senses  is  either 
sacramental  or  it  is  sensual,  and  if  it  is  sensual,  it 
is  not  simply  indifferent  from  the  point  of  view  of 
religion,  but  positively  degrading.  Unless  we  dis¬ 
cern  the  glory  of  God  in  eating  and  drinking,  in 
working  and  playing,  we  eat  and  drink  damnation 
to  ourselves.  We  work  and  play  ourselves  into  the 
hands  of  the  Devil,  we  become  the  bondservants 
of  sordid  and  cloying  sense.  And  men  do  this 
daily,  in  offices  and  factories,  and  in  theatres  and 
music  halls,  while  all  the  time  they  might  in  the 
same  places,  and  in  much  the  same  occupations,  be 
scaling  the  ascent  of  heaven. 

I.  The  Eternal  Significance  of  Beauty 

How  closely  intertwined  are  the  spiritual  and 
the  material  we  may  see  if  we  consider  the  imagery 
which  religion  employs.  Christ  is  the  Bread  of 
Life.  The  Church  is  His  Body.  The  Spirit  comes 
to  man  as  water  to  wash  away  his  sins,  fire  to  burn 
up  his  dross,  and  flame  to  light  his  candle.  Much 
also  of  the  language  of  religion  is  the  language  of 
love,  which  again  is  a  language  based  upon  physical 
attractions  and  emotions,  within  which  the  things 
of  the  spirit  are  discerned.  It  is  not  without 
significance  that  the  Church  has  been  able  to  use 
for  its  own  adoration  of  Christ  some  of  the  sensuous 
imagery  of  Solomon’s  Song  of  Love.  What  is  all 
this  but  the  recognition  that  all  men’s  sense  ex¬ 
periences  are  full  of  suggestions  of  an  inner  meaning. 
Whilst  he  savours  them  with  his  physical  senses, 
his  spirit  is  fed  also  with  some  feast  of  meaning 


IIO  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

which  transcends  the  world  of  sense.  The  purpose 
of  life  is  to  discern  these  spiritual  values  in  the 
material  world,  and  in  the  end  to  lay  hold  of  them 
so  firmly  that  they  are  known  and  remembered 
when  their  sense  origin  has  been  forgotten.  Once 
stored  in  memory  they  can  be  recaptured  without 
the  original  sense  stimulus  ;  but  the  fact  that  they 
all  have  their  roots  in  the  material  world  should 
never  be  forgotten. 

Now  what  there  is  in  things  which  gives  them 
this  higher  value,  it  is  difficult  to  tell.  But  it  is  no 
less  certain  that  there  is  in  scents  and  scenes  and 
sounds  some  witchery  that  sets  the  spirit  afire. 
Training  is  needed  to  perceive  these  finer  meanings, 
and  discipline  and  repose  are  needed  to  appreciate 
them  ;  just  as  restraint  and  insight  are  needed  by 
the  artist  or  musician  who  produces  them.  The 
name  we  have  for  this  quality  of  spiritual  appeal  is 
beauty ;  but  what  beauty  is  no  man  can  sayk  It 
is  a  sort  of  overplus  in  the  value  of  things,  an  over¬ 
tone  in  the  music  of  life,  which  transports  the 
spirit  out  of  itself,  and  out  of  its  immediate  surround¬ 
ings.  It  is  the  up-welling  of  the  joy  which  inheres 
in  all  the  created  works  of  God  and  the  awakening 
of  a  kindred  joy  in  those  who  appreciate  them. 
The  ultimate  attitude  of  the  spirit  to  beauty  is 
therefore  one  of  self-forgetting  worship.  This  self- 
forgetfulness  is  as  much  as  to  say  “  Here  is  some¬ 
thing  for  which  it  is  worth  while  letting  oneself  go, 
and  losing  oneself.  Here  is  something  that  is 
absolutely  worth  whiled’  And  after  all  that  is  very 
much  akin  to  what  the  spirit  says  when  it  is 
made  aware  of  the  presence  of  God  ;  for  just  as  the 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  1 1 1 


vision  of  God  will  heighten  a  man’s  sense  of 
natural  beauty,  so  the  sense  of  beauty  will  make 
him  sensitive  to  the  call  of  God  for  his  spirit’s 
devotion. 

How  near  these  things  lie  together  is  illustrated 
again  by  our  use  of  the  word  “  grace.”  When  a  man’s 
physical  bearing  or  his  moral  behaviour  reaches  a 
certain  degree  of  finish,  of  charm,  of  beauty  ;  we 
speak  of  their  grace.  Now,  grace  is  the  word  which 
we  attach  pre-eminently  to  that  quality  of  the  life 
of  Jesus  which  makes  us  long  to  be  like  Him,  and  it 
is  also  the  word  we  use  to  express  that  overflowing 
bounty  of  God  which  produces  in  man  incalculable 
inflows  of  spiritual  life.  We  have  but  to  awake  to 
the  beauty  of  things,  and  to  believe  that  life  is 
meant  for  the  discovery  and  reproduction  of  beauty, 
because  God  is  like  that,  and  from  every  corner  of 
the  world  where  beauty  lurks,  spiritual  life  and 
energy  come  flooding  in  to  our  souls. 

“  If  any  man  would  compel  you  to  go  with  him 
one  mile,  go  with  him  twain,”  said  Jesus,  in  one  of 
those  packed  sentences  into  which  He  compressed 
a  whole  philosophy  of  life  and  religion.  In  other 
words,  live  for  the  overplus,  the  overflow,  the 
superfluous.  Pay  twenty  shillings  in  the  pound, 
says  morality,  and  you  shall  be  a  respected  citizen  of 
this  world.  To  enter  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  says 
religion,  you  must  abandon  this  worldly  arithmetic 
and  give  back  always  something  more  than  you  are 
asked  or  paid  for  ;  and  that  overplus  will  somehow 
be  in  the  coinage  of  beauty.  There  is  no  joy  in 
the  morality  of  the  market-place,  no  joy  in  exchange 
which  does  not  over-pay  both  sides,  no  joy  in  making 


1 12  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

things  merely  to  serve  their  mundane  purpose. 
Joy  comes  when  a  finer  finish,  an  added  touch  of 
warmth  or  colour  is  given  to  our  speakings  or  to 
our  doings — for  the  sake  of  love  and  beauty. 

What  a  great  deal  of  meaning  also  is  packed  into 
that  story  of  the  alabaster  box  of  ointment  which  a 
woman  took  and  broke  over  Jesus’  feet !  Why  this 
waste,  said  the  disciples,  considering  how  it  might 
have  been  used  for  the  relief  of  the  poor  ?  It  was 
Judas  who  said  this  in  the  narrative,  because  he 
kept  the  bag  and  was  a  thief ;  but  there  have  been 
many  another  since  who  was  not  a  Judas,  whom 
the  incident  has  puzzled.  Why  this  expenditure 
on  cathedrals  and  organs  and  flowers  when  there 
is  lack  of  bread  for  the  poor  to  eat  ?  The  answer 
that  man  does  not  live  by  bread  alone  is  meant  to 
dethrone  all  merely  utilitarian  argument.  There 
is  a  certain  point  at  which  luxuries  become  more  im¬ 
portant  than  necessities  :  what  is  then  wanted  more 
than  physical  nourishment  is  some  sort  of  spiritual 
enravishment.  Life  needs  its  full  supply  of  the 
experiences  which  make  its  senses  thrill  :  and  youth 
needs  them  in  abundance.  As  Clutton-Brock 
has  urged,*  one  reason  why  the  sex  romance  of 
adolescence  exerts  such  an  overwhelming  power 
over  the  youth  of  this  country  is  that  it  is  the 
only  romance  they  know.  Their  experience 
of  the  linking  of  spirit  and  sense  in  acts  of 
romantic  abandonment  is  confined  to  this  one 
instance,  whereas  their  lives  should  be  full  of  the 
rapturous  spiritual  enjoyment  of  the  things  of 
sense. 


*  In  The  Ultimate  Belief, 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  113 

Just  how  the  immediate  experience  of  beauty  in 
Nature  and  Art  is  related  to  the  conscious  personal 
experience  of  God  is  not  easy  to  define.  It  is  sig¬ 
nificant  that  the  experience  of  God  cannot  entirely 
express  itself  till  it  has  made  use  of  beauty.  It 
needs  beauty  of  phrase  and  tone  to  convey  it  to 
others.  Prayer  tends  naturally  towards  poetic 
expression  ;  it  seems  not  only  to  demand  richness 
of  phrase,  but  also  to  create  its  own  rhythms.  It  is 
not  only  the  Anglican  priest  who  intones  the 
prayers  he  uses  in  the  congregation  ;  in  the  Free 
Church  prayer-meeting  the  extempore  prayer  of  the 
uneducated  layman  often  becomes  a  kind  of 
rhythmic  chant.  Strike  out  all  the  poetry  and  the 
melody  which  religion  has  created  for  its  service, 
forbid  the  impassioned  rhetoric  of  the  preacher,  or 
the  pregnant  symbolism  of  the  religious  rite,  and 
should  we  not  make  our  denuded  testimony  im¬ 
potent  and  false  ?  It  is  hard,  indeed,  to  convey 
our  meaning  to  those  to  whom  we  speak  of  God 
unless  they  have  authentic  experiences  whereby  to 
interpret  the  only  language  in  which  God  can  be 
adequately  described — the  language  of  beauty. 

The  experience  of  beauty  is  thus  at  least  an 
avenue  to  the  experience  of  God,  and  an  outcome 
of  it  :  is  it  that  experience  itself  ?  Surely  it  is  an 
experience  of  God  Himself.  It  is  an  apprehension 
of  the  spiritual  goodness  which  lies  behind  and 
inter-penetrates  the  material  world.  Granted  that 
the  beauty  we  acclaim  is  really  beautiful,  the 
recognition  of  its  beauty  is  as  much  a  discernment 
of  God  as  is  the  recognition  of,  say,  a  noble  act  that 
has  its  source  in  Him. 


1 


1 14  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

It  is  God’s  glory  that  is  revealed  to  us  whenever 
we  find  in  any  action  or  any  experience  something 
so  good  that  it  sends  our  spirits  soaring.  Whether 
it  be  the  blue  of  a  gentian,  or  the  sound  of  a  breeze, 
or  the  passing  of  light  over  a  cornfield,  or  a  lithe 
human  figure,  or  a  clean  stroke  in  tennis,  a  gracious 
salutation,  or  an  heroic  act — if  it  carries  us  out  of 
ourselves  in  wonder,  or  gratitude,  or  the  desire  to 
share  our  joy,  we  have  heard  God’s  voice.  All 
beauty  has  indeed  its  source  in  Him,  just  as  truth 
and  goodness  have.  They  are  distinct  and  com¬ 
plementary  revelations  of  the  one  perfection,  so 
that  if  we  recognise  any  of  these  things  for  what  it 
is.  we  are  at  least  entering  upon  an  experience  of 
God. 

How  full  and  satisfying  such  an  experience  will 
be  must  always  depend  upon  the  degree  to  which 
the  spirit  has  made  itself  familiar  with  God  in  other 
experiences.  To  know  God  is  more  than  to  have 
a  few  isolated  experiences  of  Him.  To  know  God 
is  to  have  a  whole  network  of  experiences  through 
each  of  which  some  knowledge  of  Him  has  been 
borne  in  upon  the  spirit  through  the  senses,  and 
whose  occurrence  has  made  us  aware  of  a  Reality,  a 
Presence,  a  Person  from  whom  they  come.  Till 
we  have  learnt  to  ascribe  some  element  in  all  our 
experiences  to  a  Father,  we  can  hardly  be  said  to 
know  God  as  Christians  in  any  of  them.  And 
when  we  have  found  God  present  in  that  way  in 
life,  no  isolated  experience  of  His  works  will  satisfy 
us  unless  we  can  consciously  recognise  Him  in  and 
through  it. 

There  are,  indeed,  some  who  are  at  present 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  n$ 

sensitive  only  to  truth,  or  to  beauty,  or  to  moral 
right,  and  their  character  tends  to  be  cold  or  dreamy 
or  hard  accordingly.  There  may  be  some  who  will 
never  be  sensitive  to  the  beauty  of  nature  till  their 
aesthetic  sense  has  been  aroused  by  such  a  moral 
experience  as  the  experience  of  forgiveness.  There 
are  some,  again,  who  are  sensitive  to  a  divine  appeal 
in  beauty  who  yet  have  not  related  this  voice  of 
the  divine  to  the  voice  of  God  they  hear  in  conscience 
— and  their  natures  are  distracted  and  enfeebled 
because  it  is  so.  And  there  are  others  who  have 
felt  the  experience  of  nature’s  beauty  as  a  positive 
pain  because  of  their  lack  of  faith  in  the  goodness 
of  God’s  purpose  for  mankind.  They  have  no 
vision  of  beauty  in  the  divine  ordering  of  human 
life,  no  glimpse  of  the  satisfying  perfection  of  the 
social  purpose  of  God,  and  hence  their  experience 
of  beauty  is  as  the  sound  of  a  voice  that  mocks  the 
passion  of  desire  which  it  arouses  in  their  souls. 
To  them  the  experience  of  beauty  is  not  as  yet 
the  experience  of  finding  God  :  but  maybe  it  is 
part  of  the  experience  of  God  seeking  them  ;  the 
foretaste  of  an  experience  of  a  God  who  is  truly 
amazing  and  wonderful,  but  still  terrible  because 
still  untrusted  and  unknown.  The  experience  of 
beauty  as  an  experience  of  God  is  only  fully 
possible  to  those  who  in  some  way  or  other  have 
experienced  “  the  grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ.” 
Hence,  and  in  spite  of  all  Christian  Philistines,  the 
tremendous  stimulus  which  Christianity  has  given 
in  history  to  the  appreciation  of  nature  and  to 
every  form  of  art. 


ii 6  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 


II.  The  Present  Neglect  of  Beauty 

At  the  present  day,  however,  beauty  is  at  a 
discount  in  the  world,  and  morality  and  religion 
are  both  impoverished  in  consequence.  Whereas 
the  aim  and  sum  of  all  morality  should  be  to  bring 
mankind  to  appreciate  and  to  share  whatever  in 
life  is  in  any  sense  lovely,  morality  has  usually 
concerned  itself  exclusively  witn  that  which  is 
narrowly  useful.  Thereby  it  is  given  two  un¬ 
related  functions,  one  being  to  supply  the  material 
necessities  of  the  world,  and  the  other  to  minister 
to  its  moral  health.  Thus  the  moralist  divorced 
from  the  artist  loses  sight  of  the  middle  section  of 
human  duty  which  should  unite  the  two,  the. 
ministry  to  the  world’s  hunger  for  pure  enjoyment 
and  delight.  Now,  when  this  supremely  important 
segment  of  life  is  forgotten,  religion  is  reduced  to  a 
hard  utilitarian  morality.  It  is  so  at  the  present 
day,  when  the  idea  of  religion  is  far  too  frequently 
associated  with  the  horsehair  and  oatmeal  porridge 
idea  of  morality,  and  consequently  is  rejected. 
Indeed,  most  men  have  actually  come  to  think  that 
it  is  frivolous  and  idle  to  spend  more  time  in  com¬ 
munion  with  God  than  is  strictly  necessary  to  keep 
them  in  the  paths  of  virtue.  We  think  that  we 
must  put  so  much  energy  into  being  good  that  in 
this  wicked  world  we  have  none  to  spare  for  being 
merely  religious.  From  this  delusion  we  need  to 
be  delivered  by  a  refreshment  of  our  sense  of 
aesthetic  values.  W7e  must  practise  art  for  its 
own  sake  and  play  for  the  sheer  joy  of  it,  or  we 
shall  lose  our  sense  of  the  right  of  religion  to 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  117 

be  cultivated  except  for  its  moral  utility,  and 
refuse  to  practise  communion  with  God  unless 
morally  it  pays. 

I  have  already  suggested  that  no  unqualified 
certificate  of  religious  approval  can  be  given  to 
everything  which  claims  to  be  artistic.  It  is  possible 
to  mistake  the  grotesque  for  the  beautiful  and 
appreciate  that  which  we  ought  rather  to  spurn. 
There  are  true  and  false  values  in  aesthetic  feeling. 
There  are  aesthetic  experiences  which  are  in  them¬ 
selves  essentially  diabolical,  disintegrating  to  person¬ 
ality,  destructive  of  the  soul.  They  interpret  and 
rejoice  in  that  which  is  essentially  sinister  and  evil. 
They  apprehend,  express,  and  communicate  not 
the  good  which  is  at  the  heart  of  reality,  but  the 
evil  which  is  bound  up  with  it  in  this  mixed  stage 
of  being  through  which  our  souls  pass  for  their 
education.  And  that  means  that  Christian  educa¬ 
tion  in  aesthetic  values  is  of  supreme  importance. 
As  we  judge  aesthetic  values,  so  we  are  likely  to 
judge  moral  and  spiritual  values.  There  is  a  curious 
parallelism  between  the  spheres  of  goodness,  truth, 
and  beauty,  so  that  although  they  are  distinct  and 
separate  spheres  there  is  a  sort  of  congruity  between 
what  is  good  and  bad  in  each.  The  same  terms 
can  thus  be  used  in  criticism  of  a  picture,  a  song, 
a  book,  a  religion,  a  character.  And  it  is  certainly 
true  that  if  we  tolerate  ugliness  or  lack  of  discipline, 
coarseness,  heaviness,  or  self-indulgence  in  art  and 
play,  these  will  recur  in  religion  and  conduct.  If 
we  are  content  with  what  is  cheap  and  pretty  and 
easy  in  art,  we  shall  be  content  with  what  is  super¬ 
ficial  and  taking  in  conduct.  If  we  are  content 


1 1 8  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

with  what  is  merely  sugary  in  music  we  shall  incline 
to  the  sentimental  in  religion.* 

Another  conclusion  may  now  be  added  to  those 
already  set  down  regarding  the  Christian  con¬ 
ception  of  work.f  Carrying  the  idea  of  the  duty  of 
good  workmanship  only  a  point  further  we  may 
now  say  that  all  work  should  aim  not  only  at  finish 
and  distinction,  but  ultimately  at  some  real  beauty. 
It  is  not  worthy  of  men  and  women  to  whom  God 
has  given  the  capacity  for  creating  and  enjoying 
beauty  that  it  should  be  so  little  exercised  in  their 
work  and  in  their  working  surroundings.  It  is  not 
realised  how  seriously  the  neglect  of  beauty  starves 
the  spiritual  nature  of  man,  reacts  unfavourably 
upon  his  morality,  and  drains  away  his  energy. 
Particularly  to-day,  when  so  much  human  power 
is  put  into  manufacture,  the  importance  of  beauty 
needs  emphasis.  The  cult  of  utility  at  the  expense 
of  beauty  is  a  direct  blow  at  the  ideal  and  spiritual 
interests  in  life.  It  is  a  dangerous  denial  of  the 
spiritual  purpose  of  the  material  world.  It  rele¬ 
gates  the  spiritual  too  much  to  leisure  time,  making 
it  an  extra,  and  probably  a  luxury.  It  is  therefore 
needful  that  we  do  something  to  recover  our 
standards  of  beauty  in  the  production  of  articles 
of  use  of  every  kind — clothes,  houses,  furniture, 
streets,  and  public  buildings  ;  everything  indeed  on 

*  This  is  the  motive  behind  the  present-day  attempt  to  reform 
Church  music  and,  especially,  hymn  music.  The  Church  Music 
Society  and  many  prominent  musicians  are  identified  with  it,  and 
the  new  standards  can  be  discerned  in  such  productions  as  The 
English  Church  Hymnal,  In  Hoc  Signo,  etc.,  while  the  hymn¬ 
singing  festivals  conducted  in  various  places  are  attempting  to 
popularise  the  movement. 

t  In  Chapter  IV. 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  119 

which  our  minds  tend  to  rest.  By  beauty  we  do 
not,  of  course,  mean  mere  prettiness,  still  less  mere 
ornament.  Decorative  effects  are  often  gained  at 
the  expense  of  beauty,  and  there  is  beauty  often 
enough  in  things  which  are  severely  plain  :  the 
absolutely  fitting  thing  is  of  itself  beautiful.  But 
beauty  must  be  sought  sometimes  for  its  own  sake, 
and  not  obtained  always  and  only  as  a  by-product. 

We  have,  therefore,  deliberately  to  fight  the 
ugliness  and  the  racket  and  clamour  of  much  of  the 
working  life  of  to-day,  on  the  ground  that  God  loves 
quiet  and  beauty.  And  because  God  loves  finish 
and  delicacy  in  work,  we  must  try  to  achieve  these 
qualities  in  our  individual  efforts  and  make  their 
pursuit  more  possible  in  the  collective  life  of  industry 
and  commerce,  to  the  utmost  of  our  power.  If  it 
is  indeed  true  that  we  may  “  experience  ”  God  in 
the  experience  of  beauty  and  the  joy  of  successfully 
beautiful  achievement,  then  as  religious  people  we 
are  bound  to  do  so,  and  to  make  it  possible  for 
others  to  do  so  wherever  we  can.  The  thought  of 
what  we  may  thereby  achieve  is  brought  out  in 
less  prosaic  language  in  the  following  poem  by 
John  Drinkwater  : — 

If  all  the  carts  were  painted  gay 
And  all  the  streets  swept  clean, 

And  all  the  children  came  to  play 
By  hollyhocks,  with  green 
Grasses  to  grow  between ; 

r 

If  all  the  houses  looked  as  though 
Some  heart  were  in  their  stones, 

If  all  the  people  that  we  know 
Were  dressed  in  scarlet  gowns. 

With  feathers  in  their  crowns ; 


i2o  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

I  think  this  gaiety  would  make 
A  spiritual  land, 

I  think  that  holiness  would  taka 
This  laughter  by  the  hand, 

Till  both  should  understand. 

We  grant  fully,  however,  the  extreme  difficulty 
of  realising  any  high  standard  of  beauty  in  the 
modern  world  of  manufacture  and  business — 
demoralised  as  it  is  both  ethically  and  aesthetically, 
because  it  is  keyed  up  too  hard  to  the  note  of 
utility.  Hence  the  enormous  importance  of  using 
play  for  the  establishment  of  right  scales  of  aesthetic 
value,  so  as  to  make  the  taste  for  beauty  pure  and 
strong  enough  to  tell.  In  some  amusements  we 
may  find  an  appeal  to  self-indulgence  and  selfishness, 
and  an  expression  of  the  spirit  of  vanity  and 
derision  of  all  that  is  good  that  are  nothing  short  of 
diabolical.  While  others  will  embody  and  express 
a  spirit  of  hilarity  wholly  attuned  to  the  clear  and 
happy  harmonies  of  the  Gospel.  A  lesson  of  the 
greatest  importance  in  morals  and  religion  may 
be  taught  when  boys  and  girls  are  given  the 
opportunity  to  experience  the  latter.  To  give  such 
opportunities  to-day  is  a  magnificent  service,  both 
because  of  the  ardour  and  energy  which  the  youth 
of  to-day  has  available  for  its  games,  and  because 
of  the  great  variety  of  good  games  and  fine  shows 
now  available. 

In  gauging  the  importance  of  this  matter,  we 
are  bound  to  remember  how  little  scope  the  living 
conditions  of  so  many  give  them  either  for  the 
enjoyment  of  beauty  or  for  the  creation  of  it. 
As  we  have  said  already,  throughout  the  vigorous 
hours  of  the  best  of  their  days,  a  great  many  people 


BEAUTY  AND  THE  LIFE  OF  THE  SPIRIT  121 


are  making  things  which  are  significant  of  no 
generous  thought  or  beautiful  emotion.  They  go 
home  to  surroundings  which  speak  of  little  or  no 
divine  loveliness,  either  inside  their  homes  or 
outside  them.  Despite  the  morally  and  spiritually 
depressing  tendencies  of  these  occupations  and 
surroundings,  they  do  indeed  manage  to  preserve 
and  cultivate  much  beauty  of  feeling  and  action 
in  their  dealings  with  each  other,  and  in  their 
devotion  to  God  ;  but  how  much  more  exuberant 
and  lavish  would  be  their  exercise  of  virtue,  how 
much  more  completely  attuned  to  goodness  wTould 
be  their  spirits,  if  they  could  but  enter  more  fully 
and  deeply  into  the  true  experiences  of  worth  and 
goodness  in  their  play ! 

At  the  present  day  there  is  in  the  world  so  great 
a  craving  for  beauty  that  not  to  satisfy  it  would  be 
to  do  an  almost  irreparable  injury  to  the  spiritual 
life  of  the  world.  Particularly  are  the  young 
seized  and  shaken  by  it.  Experienced  teachers  tell 
how  great  a  change  has  come  over  their  pupils  in 
this  respect  within  a  couple  of  decades.  It  may  be 
that  it  is  in  this  direction  particularly  that  the 
modern  spirit  is  hungry  for  God  :  and  if  this  be 
so,  beauty  must  be  one  of  the  serious  pursuits  of 
the  present  age,  or  religion  will  wither  away.  For 
the  world  to-day,  it  is  strictly  and  soberly  speaking 
a  choice  between  the  pursuit  of  beauty  and  the 
decay  of  religion,  a  choice  between  Art  and  Atheism. 
We  must  learn  better  to  attend  to  the  marvels 
which  God  is  daily  showing  in  the  fields  and  in  the 
sky,  and  to  the  beauty  He  has  printed  on  the  faces 
and  on  the  deeds  of  men,  or  we  shall  miss  some  part 


122  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

of  the  essential  evidence  of  His  Presence  in  our 
life,  and  deny  ourselves  some  sources  of  peace  and 
strength  and  gladness  upon  which  we  might  other¬ 
wise  be  drawing  to  meet  the  strain  and  fret  of  our 
days.  Equally,  too,  must  we  learn  to  emulate  our 
God  in  the  production  and  multiplication  of  beauty, 
or  we  shall  not  sufficiently  realise  what  loveliness 
is  and  what  it  costs  to  produce — and  lacking  that 
essential  knowledge  shall  not  be  quick  to  discern 
how  desirable  and  how  worshipful  is  the  grace  of 
our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  in  His  life  and  death  and  in 
His  calling  to  us  to  follow  Him. 


CHAPTER  VII 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  RELIGIOUS  GROWTH 

I.  The  Rudiments  of  the  Religious  Spirit 

And  now  let  us  see  what  conclusions  our  argument 
will  carry.  We  have  been  picturing  the  spiritual  life 
not  as  a  life  whose  ideal  was  to  edge  away  as  far  as 
possible  from  the  toil  and  the  reward  of  material 
activity,  but  one  whose  ideal  was  to  wrest  its 
spiritual  treasures  from  these  very  things.  The 
essence  of  the  Christian  life  is  not  its  mental  conver¬ 
sations  with  God  in  retirement,  but  its  personal 
co-operation  with  God  in  everyday  action.  Our 
highest  moments  of  spiritual  meditation  will  not  be 
the  poorer,  but  the  richer  by  every  experience  of 
effort  and  enjoyment  we  have  had  in  our  struggle 
to  make  the  most  of  the  world  which  God  has  made 
our  home.  The  thought  is  familiar  enough,  at 
least  on  one  side.  Christian  teaching  has  always 
taught  men  to  look  upon  the  discipline  of  life  as 
the  means  by  which  they  can  learn  what  moral  and 
spiritual  values  are  eternal,  and  acquire  such  moral 
and  spiritual  characters  as  will  outlast  the  world. 
It  is,  perhaps,  a  less  familiar  thought  that  the 
delights  of  the  world  are  equally  charged  with 
revelations  of  spiritual  value  and  equally  potent  for 

123 


I24  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

our  spiritual  education,  and  are  not  more  fraught 
with  temptation  and  danger  than  is  the  discipline 
of  work  and  sorrow. 

This  brings  the  whole  of  the  natural  life,  and  no 
mere  fraction  of  it,  into  the  realm  of  religion.  The 
religious  life  is  the  life  that  is  responsive  to  the 
appeal  of  the  spiritual  in  everything,  in  a  sonnet  as 
much  as  in  a  sermon,  in  a  dance  as  well  as  in  a  duty. 
The  Christian  life  is  the  life  that  perceives  these 
spiritual  values  as  Christ  would  perceive  them  and 
reacts  toward  them  as  He  would.  The  Christian 
attitude  toward  the  varied  experiences  of  life  is 
therefore  not  one  of  suspicion,  though  it  is  one  of 
discrimination.  Experience,  grave  or  gay,  is  always 
presenting  opportunities  for  choice  ;  but  the  choice 
is  not  between  refusing  the  world’s  gifts  and  accept¬ 
ing  them.  The  choice  is  between  accepting  them 
sottishly  and  accepting  them  with  a  keen  palate 
for  their  finest  flavours  ;  between  accepting  them 
selfishly  and  accepting  them  socially ;  between 
accepting  them  for  the  passing  satisfaction  of  the 
flesh,  and  accepting  them  as  a  sacrament  of  God’s 
goodness.  All  experiences  are  capable  of  being 
received  with  purely  animal  passion,  or  merely 
vegetable  passivity  ;  but  all  are  capable  of  being 
received  with  a  quickening  of  the  spirit  which  can 
see  them  as  symbols  of  the  speech  of  God  to  our 
spirits.  The  choice  we  have  then  to  make,  to  be 
religious,  and  especially  to  be  Christian,  is  not  the 
choice  of  refraining  from  doing  the  things  which 
the  natural  man  desires  to  do,  but  of  doing  them 
with  more  refinement  of  perception,  more  pro¬ 
portion  between  one  activity  and  another,  more 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  125 

care  to  promote  the  enjoyments  of  our  fellows,  and 
a  more  insatiable  passion  for  the  best.  It  is 
necessary  to  grasp  firmly  this  fundamental  quality 
of  the  religious  life  if  we  are  to  think  clearly  and 
truly  of  the  stages  of  religious  growth. 

The  religious  spirit  is,  then,  the  spirit  wooed  to 
self-forgetfulness  by  the  experience  of  things  really 
good,  and  inspired  by  their  goodness  to  want  to 
copy  them  and  to  share  them.  Inasmuch,  then,  as 
all  perfection  is  summed  up  in  God  and  revealed  in 
Christ,  the  religious  spirit,  in  its  perfection,  is  just 
the  love  and  worship  of  God  in  Christ.  But  this 
is  the  sum  and  total  of  it,  its  final  flower.  In  its 
simplest  essence  it  is  just  the  disinterested  desire 
for  perfection,  the  recognition  of  something  so 
absolutely  worth  while  that  one  can  forget  oneself 
in  the  desire  to  enjoy  it,  to  imitate  it,  to  assimilate 
and  re-embody  it,  to  multiply  it  and  pass  it  on. 
There  is  very  little  content  in  the  religion  of  a  man 
who  can  appreciate  nothing  but  his  religion.  Who 
wants  the  praise  of  a  man  who  can  only  praise  one 
thing  ?  Who  wants  the  adulation  of  the  narrow¬ 
minded,  inexperienced,  starved  and  pinched  souls 
who  have,  as  it  were,  been  nowhere  and  seen  nothing 
in  God’s  universe  ?  Does  God  glory  in  such 
praise  ?  Surely  the  most  religious  spirit  is  the 
spirit  which  can  find  in  the  most  of  God’s  w’orks 
their  own  distinctive  worth  and  goodness.  It  will 
not  find  less  in  the  more  complex  and  exacting  of 
life’s  experiences  from  having  found  more  in  those 
which  are  simple  and  elementary. 

There  are,  indeed,  degrees  of  good,  things  higher 
and  lower,  things  too  juvenile  for  the  grown  man  to 


126  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

linger  over,  successive  choices  to  be  made  in  which 
we  turn  aside  from  that,  in  order  to  make  more  sure 
of  this.  But  we  shall  follow  a  false  scent  from  the 
beginning  if  we  fail  to  realise  that  in  its  simplest 
essence  the  religious  spirit  is  one  of  sheer  admiration 
for  a  good  thing,  and  self-forgetfulness  in  seeking  it. 
And  that  is  why  the  religious  spirit  can  be  manifest 
in  games  and  exercised  by  games  just  as  it  can  be 
manifest  in  art  and  exercised  by  art.  A  good  game 
is  indeed  a  rudimentary  form  of  art.  It  is  an 
attempt  to  do  something  which  has  no  permanent 
value  except  the  value  of  the  joy  to  which  it  gives 
rise.  And  the  joy  of  a  game  is  either  the  joy  of 
seeing  things  so  well  done  that  we  are  carried  out  of 
ourselves  with  appreciation,  or  the  joy  of  being 
carried  out  of  ourselves  in  the  attempt  to  do  things 
well  ourselves.  It  is  a  mixture  of  worship  and  self- 
forgetfulness,  and  dedication  to  perfection.  Where 
there  is  this  spirit  (even  in  its  most  elementary  form) 
there  is,  in  boy  or  girl,  a  germ  of  the  spirit  life  which 
is  capable  of  untold  expansion  and  development. 
Whereas,  if  this  spirit  be  not  present  in  its  more 
elemental  forms,  the  religious  spirit,  when  it 
awakens  later  as  a  devotion  to  a  moral  ideal  or  in 
gratitude  for  the  offer  of  eternal  salvation,  is  apt 
to  take  in  men  and  women  a  selfish,  and  even  at 
times  a  sour,  form.  The  more  sources  of  admiration 
and  springs  of  energetic  action  there  are  in  any 
life,  the  richer  will  be  its  religious  spirit  when  it 
matures. 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  127 

II.  The  Growth  of  the  Religious  Spirit 

There  is,  of  course,  as  we  have  said,  a  proper 
sequence  of  admirations  and  interests  in  an  un¬ 
folding  life,  and  life  goes  astray  if  it  falls  out  of 
its  proper  course,  whether  precociously  arriving  too 
soon  at  what  should  be  its  more  advanced  adjust¬ 
ments  of  itself  to  the  world,  or  childishly  refusing 
to  grow  up.  The  progress  of  the  spirit  is  twofold — 
ever  deeper  and  finer  in  its  appreciations,  and  ever 
wider  and  wider  in  its  sympathies.  Thus  growth  in 
religion  is  growth  in  appreciation  of  the  common 
things  in  life,  coupled  with  growth  in  desire  to  make 
their  appreciation  universal.  Self-centred  action 
and  self-consciousness  are  more  and  more  replaced 
by  consciousness  of  the  divine  potentialities  of 
life,  and  self-devotion  to  the  work  of  making  those 
potentialities  universally  realised. 

Yet  another  feature  of  our  spiritual  growth  is 
the  gradual  concentration  of  our  aims  and  interests 
towards  a  goal.  The  pursuit,  by  each  individual, 
of  those  aims  and  interests  for  which  he  has  some 
innate  fitness,  tends  to  make  him,  in  the  end,  a 
person  unlike  any  other  in  the  particularity  of  his 
development.  Out  of  the  special  ingredients  of  his 
life  each  one  is  capable  of  creating  a  unique  person¬ 
ality,  with  unique  value  to  his  friends  and  to  the 
world.  There  is  in  each  of  us  a  creative  faculty 
like  that  which  in  the  artist  expresses  itself  in 
pictures.  Each  has  a  persistent  striving  toward 
some  particular  line  of  development  along  which  he 
will  find  harmony  and  fulfilment.  All  personality 
aspires  towards  the  unity  and  articulation  of  a  work 


128  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 


of  art.  In  some  this  expression  comes,  as  I  have 
said,  through  the  medium  of  the  plastic  arts  ; 
in  others,  it  will  be  through  music,  or  through 
literature,  through  handicraft  or  through  the 
education  of  children  ;  or  it  may  be  by  a  combina¬ 
tion  of  these,  or  along  quite  other  lines.  But  none 
of  us  can  reach  his  fulfilment  except  along  lines 
particular  to  ourselves,  each  of  us  learning  to  live 
and  labour  truly  for  something  we  can  appreciate. 

Now,  this  urge  in  each  individual  is  the  most 
significant  part  of  him  from  the  point  of  view  of 
his  education.  It  is  this  power  to  do  something  and 
desire  to  do  it  vigorously  and  well  that  is  the  centre 
of  his  life.  Whatever  direction  it  takes  the  wise 
educator  follows  it.  Growth  will  come  strongly 
and  naturally  only  if  this  surging  life  force  in  the 
individual  is  encouraged  to  express  itself  freely 
and  enjoyably.  At  the  beginning,  this  gift  for 
action  or  perception,  this  creative  power  in  each 
individual  will  be  exercised  both  blindly  and 
selfishly,  for  we  are  all  utterly  self-centred  beings 
in  our  cradles,  and  crude  in  the  extreme  for  many  a 
year.  But  every  such  gift  is  capable  both  of  refine¬ 
ment  and  re-direction,  and  the  moral  and  spiritual 
education  of  each  separate  being  will  be  successful 
in  proportion  as  it  is  able  to  refine  and  re-direct  this 
innate  power,  giving  it  increasing  insight  into  what 
is  worth  doing  and  worth  feeling,  and  increasing 
devotion  to  the  aim  of  spreading  abroad  whatever 
it  can  produce  that  others  can  enjoy.  The  problem 
of  growth  is  thus  the  right  transition  from  blind 
self-centred  and  purposeless  living  to  disinterested 
devotion  to  the  best.  It  involves  a  progressive 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  129 

understanding  of  the  deeper,  more  spiritual  values 
in  life,  and  a  progressive  transition  from  an  external 
view  to  a  spiritual  view  of  all  things. 

We  have  thus  identified  spiritual  growth  with 
growth  in  insight  into  the  mysterious  delightfulness, 
the  all  but  inexpressible  quality  and  charm  which 
are  to  be  found  here,  there,  and  everywhere  in 
conduct  and  in  the  material  world  ;  coupled  with 
growth  in  the  habitual  self-forgetfulness  which  is 
natural  to  those  who  are  obsessed  with  the  wonder 
of  life  and  the  opportunities  of  sharing  its  wonder. 
And  having  done  so  we  can  now  go  on  to  claim  that 
such  a  development  is  in  the  strict  sense  natural. 
We  are  built  for  it.  That  is  what  is  meant  by  the 
saying  that  man  is  made  in  the  image  of  God.  The 
power  to  find  and  reproduce  and  distribute  good 
things  is  natural  to  him.  There  may  be  another 
nature  warring  in  him  too,  a  natural  tendency 
to  evil ;  but  it  is  not  more  natural  than  the  tendency 
to  good.  Growth  in  religion  thus  comes  naturally 
to  those  who  are  so  happily  circumstanced  that  the 
natural  growth  of  goodness  is  not  thwarted.  They 
have  no  need  to  cultivate  some  strange  sixth  sense. 
They  have  but  to  respond  successively  to  the 
invitations  of  the  spirit  to  see  and  to  follow  the 
best  things  in  the  natural  unfolding  of  their  lives. 

Nature,  in  fact,  is  constantly  urging  life  along 
a  path  of  development  which  invites  the  unfolding 
of  an  ideal  and  unselfish  life.  In  many  features  of 
our  mental  life  this  is  evident.  In  the  first  place, 
Nature  furnished  us  wdth  that  indefinable  but  all- 
powerful  instinct  which  we  call  the  instinct  of  the 
herd,  which  forbids  us  normally  to  be  quite  happy 

K 


130  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

when  we  are  alone,  thus  driving  us  toward  a  sociable 
life.  And  then  she  has  equipped  us  with  a  whole 
apparatus  of  mental  powers  which  make  it  possible 
for  us  rapidly  to  enter  into  and  acquire  for  ourselves 
the  emotions,  the  ideas,  the  behaviour  which  we 
see  embodied  around  us.  Given,  then,  a  social 
environment  in  which  good  models  of  action  and 
feeling  are  manifest,  and  we  have  every  chance  of 
acquiring  a  right  spirit  and  disposition.  Moreover, 
adolescence  brings  with  it  a  sudden  power  to 
appreciate  big  ideals  of  right  and  truth  and  beauty 
so  that  the  transition  from  selfishness  to  altruism,  and 
from  spiritual  blindness  to  spiritual  vision  is  in  the 
strict  sense  natural  to  every  boy  and  girl  when  that 
great  crisis  of  their  physical  growth  steals  over  them. 

These  facts  are  the  commonplaces  of  the 
psychology  of  the  social  life.  We  are  so  constituted 
that  although  we  are  born  with  only  the  most 
primitive  physical  appetites,  and  with  not  the 
smallest  concern  with  the  happiness  of  any  life  but 
our  own,  life  tends  to  build  up  in  us,  by  rapid  pro¬ 
cesses,  a  sense  of  our  oneness  with  others,  a  desire 
to  be  at  peace  with  them,  a  readiness  to  surrender 
the  view  or  the  claim  which  thwarts  the  common 
welfare  and  to  cultivate  the  ways  which  accord 
with  the  ways  of  others.  Our  behaviour,  our 
emotional  reactions,  our  intellectual  concepts,  are 
all  assimilated  quickly  and  easily  from  our  social 
environment,  and  if  it  be  favourable  we  may  quite 
rapidly  acquire  a  character  which  is  both  unselfish 
and  discriminating.  The  apparatus  by  which  the 
entail  of  Christianity  is  passed  on  from  life  to  life 
is  nothing  less  than  amazing.  If,  then,  fine  ideals 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  131 

are  visibly  embodied  for  us  in  the  social  environ¬ 
ment  of  home,  or  school,  or  Church,  if  they  are 
expressed  in  action  and  not  paraded  and  pressed 
upon  us  in  words,  they  have  an  astonishing  power 
of  communicating  themselves  by  sheer  contagion. 

This  is  not,  of  course,  to  assert  that  they  are 
communicated  inevitably.  We  do  not  forget  that 
evil  embodied  in  the  social  life  around  us  has  also 
and  equally  its  contagious  power.  Nature  is  too 
easily  content  with  arrests  in  the  development  of 
her  types,  with  delay  and  frustration.  A  fatal 
inertia  besets  all  natural  organisms,  with  their 
limited  stores  of  energy  and  knowledge.  We  tire 
and  are  content  to  let  the  partial  good  we  have 
achieved  become  the  enemy  of  further  progress. 
The  path  to  the  ideal  life  is  a  stiff  climb  upwards. 
We  must  recognise  the  tendency  of  the  unperfected 
life  to  stagnate,  to  despair  of  perfection,  to  stiffen 
itself  against  the  claims  of  the  ideal,  to  entrench 
itself  selfishly  and  stubbornly  in  the  halfway  house 
to  nobility  and  goodness  which  it  has  reached. 
The  price  of  progress  is  eternal  vigilance  and  un¬ 
wearying  initiative. 

These  facts  are  not  denied,  but  they  do  not 
annul  the  point  of  the  present  argument  that 
spiritual  development  is  strictly  natural.  And  if 
it  be  strictly  natural,  though  not  inevitable  or  easy, 
it  cannot  be  isolated  from  development  as  a  whole. 
The  spirit  does  not  grow  best  on  any  diet  of  beliefs 
and  experiences  unrelated  to  its  ordinary  interests 
and  activities.  On  the  contrary,  the  way  of  pro¬ 
gress  in  religion  is  the  way  of  faithfulness  to  the 
claims  and  invitations  of  our  ordinary  life  in  the 

0 


152  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

world.  The  growth  of  the  spirit  is  not  won  in  a 
single  engagement,  or  in  any  purely  inward  combat 
in  which  good  and  evil  confront  each  other  in 
disembodied  shapes  ;  it  is  won  in  a  thousand 
successive  engagements  in  which  man  is  invited  to 
choose  the  finer  and  more  social  action,  the  braver 
and  more  adventurous  career,  the  truer  and  more 
perfect  satisfaction.  Energy,  decision,  discrimina¬ 
tion — won  anywhere  will  be  available  everywhere. 
It  is  the  old  story  of  the  victory  of  Waterloo  won 
on  the  playing  fields  of  Eton.  Fineness  and 
strength  of  spirit  are  won  by  successive  acts  of 
choice  and  outputs  of  energy  in  every  direction  and 
equally  in  wTork  and  in  play. 

III.  The  Fostering  of  Growth 

To  secure  the  fitting  spiritual  development  of 
any  life,  it  is  therefore  necessary  to  assist  it  along 
the  road  of  its  highest  natural  development.  That 
is  best  done  by  encouraging  it  to  choose  from  time 
to  time  the  occupations  and  aims  into  which  it  can 
throw  itself  with  completest  abandonment,  because 
with  completest  sincerity,  making  sure  that  they 
are  aims  and  occupations  good  in  themselves  and 
therefore  calculated  to  lead  the  spirit  onward  and 
upward.  There  are  such  aims  and  pursuits,  adapted 
to  the  experience  and  capacity  of  folk  of  every  age 
and  condition.  From  boyhood  to  manhood,  from 
girlhood  to  womanhood,  there  are  things  to  be  done 
and  things  to  be  enjoyed  exactly  appropriate  to  the 
spirit’s  development  at  each  stage  of  its  journey. 
The  doing  and  enjoying  of  these  things  will  confirm 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  133 

the  spirit  in  its  hold  on  what  is  good  and  true, 
educate  its  powers  of  right  and  true  appreciation, 
increase  its  capacity  for  further  discovery,  and  its 
energy  for  good  living.  The  problem  of  religious 
education  is  to  find  a  true  succession  of  such  pursuits 
and  enjoyments,  adapted  to  the  expanding  capacity 
of  growing  lives. 

One  of  the  discoveries  of  the  last  few  years  has 
been  the  proper  spiritual  expression  of  childhood. 
We  have  found,  at  least  approximately,  the  forms 
of  occupation  into  which  boys  and  girls  in  their 
pre-adolescent  days  can  throw  themselves  with 
complete  zest,  and  the  maximum  of  moral  and 
spiritual  profit.  There  is  more  than  one  variation 
of  the  prescription,  but  the  type  of  activity  is 
sufficiently  covered  by  the  one  word  “  scouting.” 
Scouting  is  very  nearly  the  full  and  adequate 
expression  of  a  small  boy’s  free  energy.  Through 
scouting  he  can  bring  into  healthy  and  vigorous 
being  whatever  capacity  there  is  in  him  for  dis¬ 
covering  the  make  of  God’s  world  and  establishing 
himself  as  a  willing  and  useful  member  of  it.  If 
some  great  idea  of  God  overarching  His  world 
overarches  him  too,  he  is,  under  skilful  leadership, 
treading  the  upward  spiritual  path  far  more 
effectively  than  he  would  be  doing  it  if  he  were 
spending  his  energies  in  cultivating  spiritual  states 
or  forming  brave  resolutions.  We  are  past  the  day 
when  the  ideal  Christian  child  was  thought  to  be 
one  who  was  exercised  beyond  his  years  about  the 
state  of  his  soul,  or  the  spiritual  condition  of  his 
elders.  We  should  count  as  painful  and  disastrous 
precocity  some  of  the  traits  which  our  forefathers 


134  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

held  up  for  admiration  in  the  ideally  pious  child 
Up  to  the  age  of  adolescence,  at  least,  we  reckon 
that  the  child’s  spirit  should  grow  with  as  little 
as  possible  of  self-consciousness  and  a  maximum 
exhibition  of  juvenile  spirits. 

When  we  come  to  the  later  period  of  childhood 
and  the  early  period  of  youth,  the  same  principles 
will  hold  true,  though  we  have  not  yet  been  so 
successful  in  applying  them.  For  boys  we  have 
team  games  to  develop  keenness,  resource,  and 
esprit  de  corps,  and  for  girls  the  same  opportunities 
are  increasing.  But  we  have  not  yet  thought  out 
the  equivalent  of  scouting  as  a  real  expression  of 
the  part  which  youth  might  play,  and  might  rejoice 
to  play,  in  the  service  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  One 
might  speculate  a  little  on  the  form  which  such 
activities  might  take.  There  are  boys  and  girls 
who  have  found  themselves  and  have  made  good, 
simply  through  giving  themselves  to  the  assistance 
of  younger  children  in  their  games.  There  are 
middle-class  schools  which  have  made  the  idea  of 
universal  brotherhood  real  to  themselves  by  enter¬ 
taining  boys  of  other  schools  in  holiday  fashion, 
or  by  building  open-air  swimming  baths  for  the 
neighbouring  villagers,  and  by  other  such  acts  of 
service  appropriate  to  their  own  interests  and 
powers.  We  have  already  risked  a  generalisation 
by  suggesting*  that  youth  might  effectively  learn 

brotherhood  if  it  would  set  seriouslv  about  the  work 

✓ 

of  providing  good  games  and  proper  facilities  for 
good  games  for  everybody,  and  would  pledge  itself 
to  initiate  the  backward  and  unfortunate  into  the 


#  In  Chapter  IV. 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  135 

playing  of  them.  Or  if  this  falls  short  of  what  is 
needed  to  capture  the  growing  interests  of  the 
adolescent  in  the  welfare  of  society,  one  might 
enlist  youth  in  clubs  and  coteries  for  cleansing  and 
beautifying  the  streets  and  squares  of  our 
neglected  cities  and  villages,  and  their  older 
members  might  pass  on  in  due  time  to  attempt 
the  harder  task  of  cleansing  and  beautifying  the 
things  that  are  done  in  their  council  chambers. 

All  this,  however,  is  speculation,  set  down  more 
for  the  sake  of  illustration  than  as  a  definite  pro¬ 
posal,  and  also  for  the  sake  of  stimulating  others  to 
experiment.  The  point  for  insistence  is  that  the 
dedication  of  spirit  to  be  asked  of  early  youth  and 
later  childhood  should  not  be  too  abstract  or  difficult 
for  youth’s  understanding,  and  should  not  exact  too 
sharp  a  discipline.  Youth  should  not  be  too  much 
preoccupied  with  the  dark  sides  of  life  and  the  short¬ 
comings  of  others.  Forms  of  activity  should  be 
suggested  to  youth  through  which  the  pleasure  of 
helping  others  can  be  realised,  and  the  desire  to 
serve  others  directed  along  lines  pleasurable  in 
themselves.  Discrimination  between  what  is  good 
and  what  is  better  should  be  trained  through  art 
and  play,  and  all  sense  of  opposition  between  games 
and  recreation  on  the  one  hand  and  religion  on  the 
other  should  be  absolutely  broken  down.  It  will 
be  through  the  right  choice  of  congenial  recreations 
supporting  and  confirming  its  more  abstract  moral 
choices  that  youth  will  best  achieve  its  spiritual 
development,  learning  to  put  life  and  energy  into 
the  things  which  minister  to  life  and  to  set  its  face 
against  those  things  which  minister  to  evil. 


1 36  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

We  may  thus  sum  the  matter  up  in  two  points. 
In  the  first  place  the  activities  which  will  minister 
to  the  spiritual  development  of  youth  must  either 
be  activities  which  youth  itself  approves  or  activities 
recommended  by  people  whose  judgment  youth 
approves.  It  only  leads  to  mental  and  spiritual 
regressions  and  the  tangling  of  the  lines  of  develop¬ 
ment  if  any  personality  commits  itself  in  action  to 
courses  to  which  it  is  not  committed  in  its  own 
heart  and  in  its  own  judgment ;  and  it  complicates 
the  course  of  youth’s  spiritual  development  end¬ 
lessly  if  the  ideal  of  the  spiritual  life  is  associated 
with  the  negation  of  any  activities  which  youth  in 
its  heart  of  hearts  believes  to  be  W'holesome  and 
good,  or  with  the  exalting  of  activities  for  which 
youth  has  no  great  use  or  aptitude.  The  dis¬ 
couragement  of  any  form  of  innocent  amusement 
is  a  case  in  point,  and  the  identification  of  Christian 
service  exclusively  or  even  primarily  with  Sunday 
School  Teaching  is  another. 

In  the  second  place,  in  view  of  the  limits  of 
youth’s  experience  of  life,  the  activities  which  are 
associated  with  the  idea  of  Christian  service  should 
not  be  too  exacting  or  ascetic.  The  point  has  been 
made  already  incidentally,  but  it  should  be  made  to 
stand  out  thus  prominently  by  itself  as  a  principle 
of  first-rate  importance.  Youth  does  not  know  how 
strong  are  the  forces  of  evil  in  the  world  and  how 
much  a  point  of  honour  therefore  it  is  with  a  right- 
thinking  man  or  woman  to  shoulder  the  burden  of 
life  and  enter  the  lists  in  battle  for  the  right.  It  is 
for  manhood  and  womanhood  to  translate  the 
dreams  and  games  of  youth  into  the  stuff  of  the 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  137 

Kingdom  of  God  in  the  hard  business  of  life.  The 
business  of  youth  is  rather  to  fix  its  sense  of  values 
for  itself  than  to  make  them  operative  for  the 
world.  And  this  it  can  do  to  a  large  extent  by 
exercising  itself  in  games  which  give  value  to  what 
is  excellent,  honourable,  and  tasteful.  If  youth 
will  but  learn  to  appraise  highly  the  things  that  are 
lovely  in  themselves,  to  hate  whatever  is  cheap  and 
shoddy,  and  to  value  goodwill  above  all  things, 
manhood  and  womanhood  will  not  go  far  astray. 
Decision  rightly  exercised  in  these  ways  will  lead 
almost  invariably  to  self-discipline  and  self-sacrifice 
in  the  end. 

The  ethic  for  youth  should  not,  then,  be  too 
hard  or  dour,  unless  the  times  are  so  essentially 
and  unescapably  harsh  and  dour  that  anything 
easier  would  seem  like  shirking,  as  it  did  in  war 
time.  But  it  is  not  always  war  time,  and  for  the 
more  normal  vears  an  ethic  more  naturally  and 
obviously  joyous  is  appropriate.  Youth’s  ethic 
should  be  neither  narrowly  utilitarian  nor  darkly 
puritanical.  It  will  not  go  far  astray  if  it  has 
these  two  main  principles  as  its  foundations  :  viz., 
to  do  nothing  that  is  not  deeply  worth  while,  and 
to  keep  to  oneself  nothing  that  is.  Or  we  may  put 
the  same  thing  in  other  words  and  say  that  we 
should  seek  to  share  widely  whatever  we  really 
value  and  find  something  to  value  greatly  in  what¬ 
ever  we  choose  to  do.  There  is  a  mine  of  morality 
in  those  two  precepts.  They  express  in  terms  of 
common  use  and  plain  meaning  a  good  deal  of  man’s 
duty  to  love  his  neighbour  and  his  God.  For  the 
love  of  God  is  based  on  the  love  of  whatever  is 


138  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

lovely  in  God’s  world,  and  the  love  of  man  is  the 
will  to  pass  on  to  him  whatever  we  ourselves  have 
found  to  be  good. 

IV.  Religious  Decision 

And  now  we  have  carried  the  argument  far 
enough  to  bring  out  the  essentials  of  a  true  religious 
decision.  A  religious  decision  should  link  the 
determination  to  follow  a  particular  course  of 
action  with  the  conviction  that  to  do  so  is  absolutely 
right.  It  should,  therefore,  be  a  decision  having 
quite  clear  and  concrete  meaning  when  it  is  made  ; 
it  should  appeal  to  a  person’s  own  conviction  and 
experience  as  a  thing  really  good  in  itself,  and  not 
only  according  to  an  arbitrary  code  of  actions 
labelled  religious  ;  the  doing  of  it  should  be  so 
desirable  in  the  eyes  of  the  doer  that  the  determina¬ 
tion  to  do  it  releases  new  floods  of  energy  ;  and  it 
should  carry  with  it  the  sense  that  God  wills  man  to 
do  just  such  good  deeds.  A  religious  decision  is  thus 
a  decision  to  do  something  in  the  direction  in  which 
life  becomes  fuller,  richer,  more  deeply  satisfying 
and  stirring.  We  have  already  emphasised  the 
necessity  for  youth  that  such  decisions  should  be  in 
line  with  the  natural  joy-seeking  impulses  and  con¬ 
structive  ambitions  of  all  growing  life,  and  should 
not  be  concerned  with  artificial  interests  and  merely 
“  religious  ”  aims,  that  they  should  indeed  be  the 
choice  of  ways  that  are  deeply  felt  to  be  worth  while 
in  work  and  play  and  comradeship.  That  also 
necessitates  their  being  specific  in  meaning  and  not 
merely  vague  and  abstract. 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  139 

This  necessity  is  all  the  greater  if  decision  is 
invited  under  conditions  when  religious  emotion  is 
stirred,  as  it  may  be  stirred,  for  example,  in  mass 
meetings.  The  more  the  emotional  life  is  quickened 
on  any  such  occasion,  the  more  the  need  for  securing 
that  the  decision  should  be  worked  out  to  some  clear 
and  wide-reaching  change  of  practice,  in  home  life, 
or  the  use  of  leisure,  or  the  attitude  to  one’s  work, 
or  one’s  dealings  with  one’s  friends.  The  concrete 
expression  of  the  decision  in  terms  of  ordinary 
secular  life  is  needed  to  keep  it  practical  and  sane. 
Moreover,  such  practical  and  concrete  decisions, 
require  time  for  the  person  addressed  to  translate 
the  appeal  which  has  stirred  him  into  the  terms  of 
his  own  life  and  see  what  actually  it  would  involve 
in  conduct — at  any  rate  as  a  next  step.  That 
means  that  his  thought  needs  to  be  quickened 
simultaneously  with  his  emotional  life,  so  that  his 
critical  faculties  are  brought  to  bear  upon  the 
question  of  what  he  is  about  to  do,  and  his  judgment 
is  satisfied  that  it  carries  with  it  the  assent  of  all 
that  is  best  in  him.  For  this  reason  experienced 
psychologists  call  attention  to  the  danger  of  pre¬ 
cipitating  decisions  that  do  not  represent  the 
deliberate  thought  of  the  individual  upon  their 
specific  content.  If  decision  be  recommended  at 
a  mass  meeting,  opportunity  for  such  quiet  re¬ 
flection  needs  to  be  provided,  before  the  decision 
is  consummated. 

To  pursue  the  matter  further  would  raise 
questions  of  evangelistic  method  outside  our 
present  scope.  It  is,  however,  necessary  to  say  a 
little  more  about  decision  itself,  and  especially 


1 4o  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

about  the  stages  through  which  religious  decision 
ought  to  pass  to  its  consummation.  Decision  for 
God  must  be  an  ascending  process  of  decision  for 
the  right  and  the  true,  the  good  and  the  beautiful — 
a  process  carried  a  step  further  every  time  some 
fresh  aspect  of  right  or  truth  or  goodness,  with  its 
fresh  demand  for  quality,  comes  home  to  us.  The 
challenge  to  more  comprehensive  decision  may  come 
to  us  in  special  crises  now  and  then  when  something 
happens  to  bring  our  life  as  a  whole  under  review, 
and  we  can  see  more  clearly  if  it  is  running  off 
after  unworthy  aims.  It  may  come  tragically  in 
moments  of  disillusionment  to  lives  which  have 
embraced  wrong  courses  and  pursued  them  till  they 
have  ended  in  degradation  and  disaster  ;  or  it  may 
come  in  the  natural  crisis  of  adolescence,  when  life 
has  a  way  of  presenting  itself  to  consciousness  as 
a  whole,  and  the  choices  between  right  and  wrong 
stand  out  more  stark  and  clear  than  they  are  ever 
likely  to  do  again.  In  all  these  cases,  however, 
decision  will  be  effectively  Christian  exactly  in  pro¬ 
portion  as  the  thought  of  God  and  the  name  of 
Christ  are  linked  with  the  thought  of  definite  ways 
of  ministering  to  the  joy  and  wholesomeness  of  life. 

If  Christ  is  thus  identified  with  all  the  highest 
courses,  the  choice  of  any  one  of  them  may  become 
the  occasion  for  a  life  to  dedicate  itself  to  Him. 
The  opportunity  to  ask  for  decisions  for  Christ 
may  then  be  found  as  the  natural  climax  of  any 
of  a  hundred  different  appeals  ;  if  only  folk  are 
taught  that  whenever  they  are  fired  with  a  passion 
for  quality  in  things  or  in  behaviour,  their  fire  is  fed 
by  the  flame  of  God  Himself.  God,  the  supreme 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  141 

artist,  the  supreme  craftsman,  the  supreme  lover, 
is  at  the  heart  of  all  the  creative  joy  and  energy 
which  well  up  in  us  and  in  our  loves.  So  under¬ 
stood,  life  is  full  of  invitations  to  decide  for  God, 
and  the  wise  will  be  watchful  to  point  them  out 
at  every  turn.  Each  particular  decision  can  be 
made  a  symbol  of  the  total  dedication  of  the  life  to 
God — true  witness  to  our  aspiration  to  be  His 
entirely  ;  true  witness  also  to  His  readiness  to  take 
whatever  we  are  fit  to  offer,  in  token  of  the  whole. 

Of  all  possible  religious  decisions,  the  one  most 
nearly  capable  of  expressing  the  full  ideal  of 
devotion  to  Christ  is  the  act  of  joining  His  Church. 
The  evangelistic  appeal  should  therefore  be  most 
constantly  associated  with  this  particular  choice. 
Nothing  else  can  so  well  express  the  will  to  be  always 
and  in  all  things  Christ’s  disciples,  ever  learning 
more  of  our  calling  in  Him.  But,  for  this  to  be 
the  case,  the  Church  must  be  to  its  members  not 
only  a  place  of  Christian  worship  and  general 
Christian  teaching,  but  a  school  of  Christian  work 
and  Christian  play — a  place  where  Christian  ideals 
of  truth  and  beauty  are  embodied  in  definite  forms 
of  education  and  amusement,  and  where  Christian 
ideals  of  life  are  translated  from  the  general  into 
the  particular  in  intimate  Christian  conference. 
Such  an  ideal  might  entail  a  considerable  enlarge¬ 
ment  of  the  recreative  activities  of  many  churches 
and  a  criticism  of  the  paltriness  of  others.  It 
might  require  new  forms  of  Christian  education 
and  Christian  fellowship,  uniting  prayer  with  study 
and  discussion  of  many  practical  social  issues. 
But  the  expenditure  of  effort  would  not  be  too  great 


142  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

if  it  succeeded  in  making  clear  to  Christian  people 
how  their  spiritual  ideals  should  inter-penetrate 
their  work  and  play.  The  world  needs  individual 
witnesses  to  the  meaning  of  Christianity  quite  as 
much  as  it  needs  public  missions,  but  the  average 
Christian  is  at  present  tongue-tied  as  a  witness 
because  he  does  not  clearly  understand  the  relation 
between  the  special  inward  experiences  of  the  Spirit 
which  are  fostered  in  public  worship  and  the  com¬ 
mon  outward  activities  of  daily  life ;  and  no 
amount  of  exhortation  to  evangelise  his  neighbours 
will  make  him  anything  but  a  nuisance  and  a 
hypocrite  until  he  does. 

At  the  present  time,  however,  the  appeal  to 
join  the  Church  as  an  act  of  Christian  decision  is 
hindered  because  the  conception  of  life  commonly 
connected  with  Church  membership  is  something 
rather  unwholesomely  introspective  and  selfishly 
aloof  from  the  greater  human  causes,  if  not  even 
darkly  antagonistic  to  the  natural  joy  of  life  itself. 
Wrong  though  such  a  view  may  be,  it  is  not  wholly 
unaccountable  ;  and  whilst  it  holds,  extraordinary 
measures  are  required.  If  those  outside  the  Churches 
knew  more  of  the  sweet  charities  and  wholesome 
goodness  which  grow  up  in  the  protection  of  the 
creed  and  worship  which  to  them  seem  so  forbidding, 
they  might  be  more  ready  to  throw  in  their  lot  with 
the  Churches  as  they  are — with  all  their  disconcert¬ 
ing  faults  and  puzzling  features.  But  seeing  they 
are  ignorant  of  these  things,  the  Churches  must 
sometimes  humble  themselves  and  ask  newcomers 
to  join  the  fellowship,  not  of  the  Church  itself, 
but  of  some  more  limited  and  welcoming  group 


RELIGIOUS  DECISION  AND  GROWTH  143 

of  kindred  souls  within  it,  or  in  free  association 
with  it. 

And  now  one  thing  alone  remains  to  be  said. 
Throughout  this  book  the  emphasis  has  been  laid 
upon  the  naturalness  of  the  Christian  life  and  the 
way  in  which  its  inner  growth  should  march  with 
its  unfolding  interests  and  powers.  There  is, 
however,  another  side  to  the  matter,  not,  indeed, 
overlooked  so  far,  but  needing  in  these  closing 
paragraphs  to  stand  out  in  the  clearest  light.  The 
experience  of  God  is  more  than  the  experience  of 
goodness  or  of  beauty,  or  of  growth  in  the  apprecia¬ 
tion  of  these.  The  name  of  Christ  is  no  mere 
symbol  for  perfection.  The  crown  of  Christianity 
is  the  personal  relation  of  the  Christian  person  to 
the  Christian  God,  and  it  is  reached  through 
intimate  personal  communion  with  Jesus  Christ 
It  is  an  experience  that  cannot  be  consummated 
until  our  natures  have  been  stirred  and  searched 
by  Christ  to  their  lowest  deeps.  And  in  that 
searching  and  stirring  we  are  bound  to  undergo 
the  deep  humiliation  of  self-knowledge  and  to  be 
called  to  the  utter  abandonment  of  self,  with  all 
its  false  perspectives  and  mistaken  aims.  Thus, 
the  things  which  are  the  commonplaces  of  religious 
teaching — repentance,  faith,  and  self-surrender — 
are  still  the  things  that  matter  most.  But  these 
things  will  both  mean  more  in  themselves  and  seem 
in  better  harmony  with  whatever  else  we  know  of 
life’s  true  values  precisely  in  proportion  to  the 
thoroughness  with  which  we  have  taken  up  the 
whole  of  our  natural  life  into  the  scope  of  our 
Christian  experience  and  purpose. 


144  WORK,  PLAY,  AND  THE  GOSPEL 

So  the  upshot  of  this  book  is  not  in  any  way 
to  discredit  the  evangelist’s  aim  of  bringing  indi¬ 
viduals  to  a  personal  experience  of  God  through 
Jesus  Christ  ;  it  is  rather  to  show  that  there  are  a 
thousand  avenues  by  which  the  beginnings  of  that 
personal  experience  may  be  acquired.  Nor  does 
it  in  the  least  belittle  the  Church’s  constant  effort, 
by  its  worship  and  instruction,  its  sacraments  and 
sermons,  to  arouse  us  to  the  reality  of  God’s  Personal 
Being  and  the  demands  He  makes  upon  us  as  a 
whole  ;  it  is  rather  to  discriminate  against  a  Gospel 
which  sets  God  in  opposition  to  life.  The  choice  is 
not  between  life  and  God  ;  it  is  between  life  ever 
waning  and  dwindling  because  antagonistic  to  its 
own  ideal,  and  life  ever  waxing  and  expanding 
because  yielded  to  the  control  of  its  true  Master, 
Christ  Himself.  So  far  as  this  spreads  out  a  broader 
view  of  God’s  dealings  with  us  than  that  generally 
held,  it  makes  the  problem  of  educating  the  human 
spirit  in  the  Christian  way  a  bigger  problem,  and 
relates  it  more  closely  with  human  education  as  a 
whole.  To  that  wider  question  of  spiritual  training 
we  may  perhaps  return  in  another  book ;  but 
whether  then  or  now  the  point  of  importance  is 
not  where  Christian  experience  begins  in  the  life 
of  nature,  but  where  it  ends  in  the  heart  of  God. 
From  first  to  last  there  is  no  break  in  the  ascending 
path ;  but  everywhere  life  bears  witness  to  the 
love  of  our  Father — Holy  and  Eternal — and  calls 
upon  us  to  rise  up  and  live  as  His  whole-hearted, 
joyous  sons  and  daughters. 


* 


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